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networking

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14 Oct 2012

bangsar.net now on Amazon

By Rudy

Due to the inability of the Synology 411j NAS to host this wordpress site, we’ve finally moved to Amazon’s EC2 service. This is Amazon’s cloud service with its micro instance starting at USD15 a month if you run it 24/7.

Yes, USD15 is a little pricey for just a private wordpress blog, but Amazon allows new users to try it for free for a year. And since they have a data centre in Singapore, I thought why not?

The migration was simple enough. First step was to set up the EC2 instance, so we used one free preconfigured image by BitNami. Picked it up on the AWS Marketplace, then it’s up and running in no time.

Second step was migrating the entries over from the old blog. WordPress has a built in Import & Export feature so all the posts, including attachments, were migrated over effortlessly. Though I just realized we’re missing the posts from our guest bloggers; not sure when this happened, but it’s the same as the old site so it must’ve gotten deleted or transferred to another user during previous migrations.

Next was to point the site address from the old site to the new. The DNS server will continue running on the NAS, so it was just a matter of changing the CNAME entry from our current dynamic DNS to the Amazon one. There was a mention somewhere online that the Amazon hostname will change if the instance is restarted, so we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

After that, WordPress was running off the /wordpress subdirectory, so we needed to SSH into the instance and setup redirection from the root directory. A quick uncomment in /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/httpd.conf and it happens, but permalinks are still pointing to the /wordpress subdirectory so I’m going to have to figure out how to work that with redirection.

As you may be able to tell, the server is running zippy as ever. Will just need to keep a reminder to move the blog again to a paid local web host before the AWS Free Tier expires. 😛

04 Jun 2010

Wireless proxy configuration for your jailbroken iPhone

By Rudy

You are on your company’s WiFi network. You’ve been able to access intranet sites so far, but now you’d like to access an external site via the company’s HTTP proxy. Your company, however, does not provide a proxy auto-configuration URL. You are therefore stuck with having to add or remove the proxy manually in your iPhone WiFi settings each time you’d like to access external or local sites, respectively.

So how can we make things easier? Simple, create your own proxy.pac file.

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15 Jul 2009

the last 40 days…

By Rudy

…might be a good title for a zombie movie. 🙂

I hate Apple. Wife has a Powebook G4 that’s eligible for a 2006 battery recall, but Apple Malaysia won’t honour it as it is out of warranty. After making calls and making a query on Apple Discussions, I decided to just pass my battery to a colleague going for a vacation in the UK. New battery was delivered no questions asked.

I hate Citibank. When you talk to their customer service people they sound like all they want to do is get rid of you. You know, not in language but in the tone of their voice. Their collections department is so hard to reach.

I hate Streamyx. As usual. Been having sporadic network issues over the weekend since Saturday; download speeds would fall to shit without affecting my uploads. Couldn’t even access Streamyx or TM’s own website. I hate calling for tech support because it usually ends up making things worse.

Customer service is a failboat in this country.

I love Ip-Man. Such an awesome movie.

Upgraded some cables to CAT 6 in the hope that it’ll improve my HD streaming to the PS3. Somehow or rather my Aztech Homeplugs got fried in the process. Such delicate things.

16 Mar 2009

messing around with DLNA

By Rudy

W00t! I think we’ve finally figured out our DLNA setup.

Picked up a pair of Aztech HL108 HomePlugs from Low Yat which totally fixed the Wifi bottleneck problem. 1080 HD content streamed flawlessly from the media server.

The only remaining issues were stream compatibility on the PS3 and codecs. CCCP and TVersity combination did not seem to work for certain AVI-packaged HD content (Harry Potter 6 trailer). Playback of this video on Windows Media Player (WMP) had the video lagging behind audio by a few seconds.

PS3 Media Server (PMS), however, managed to play every single thing we threw at it, except for CDG karaoke files (which TVersity can’t seem to play either). Only caveat is that the media layout on the XMB doesn’t look as clean. There will be files that PMS can’t play the first time, but you’ll have an option to go into a #TRANSCODE# folder for that file and manually choose a transcoding option. You can even change PMS settings from the XMB, but I’ve yet the need to touch anything.

By all means, this doesn’t mean we’re done testing. Both TVersity and PMS are still enabled on the media server. I still want TVersity to work for everything because we may have more DLNA devices in the future (say, another home theater setup in the bedroom :D). I’m also still wondering how the quality of PMS’ transcoding compare against other products on the market, e.g. TVix (RM 1800~ but looks great) or the WD HD Player. We’ll want to make CDG work as well, as Fai and I are both karaoke freaks. 🙂