Latest horse video

All is improving on the horse front. Dolores (broken pelvis in Sept, 4 months in imobilised, 1 month hand walking) is now out, two foals, technically yearlings, just put back out with their mothers - see video, Piper sold (regretfully), Mike now feeding his horses some days. So from 3 hours a day min just to feed and care for them, now down to less than an hour so time to ride again!

TED is on

I'd love to go to this conference (this year, The Big Questions), but all the talks are available on video.  Share and enjoy...

http://www.ted.com

Pricing Awareness

There is much talk about how elastic the price of fuel is.  No matter how much the price of petrol goes up, it doesn't seem to effect our driving habits. I think the reason is the we only make the connection at the point of sale.  When we buy things in the shop, we have the item in hand while we make the payment, so there is a clear connection.  We wince at the pain of paying for the tank of petrol but after that driving is apparently free, we just have to buy some more petrol, sometime in the future. Salesman know about this.  Buy a car free today, nothing to pay for 12 months.  

I noticed the impact of knowing how much I was spending in realtime when I put in an electric meter in the house.  Like the petrol situation, an electricity bill is something that has to be paid, but it has an even more tenuous connection with my use of electricity because I'm not even sure how much each of my appliances is using.  Put that instant readout on and suddenly I'm much more interested in why it says 6c/hour when everything is apparently switched off, or 65c a minute when I turn the kettle on.  

So the solution to getting to reduce unnecessary car use?  Filling  up your car is free, but the oil company charge you for each mile you drive, as you drive, and a meter in the car shows the cost of your journey.  That would certainly effect my driving - slow me down as well!

See TED talk that sparked this thought: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/212

GoDaddy Support Poor - Moving to MyHost.ie

Am finding the support provided by Godaddy, both their online information and the people providing email support frustratingly inadequate. For example, I want to use the FTP backup facility provided. Nowhere does it tell me how to set it up so I sent in an email support request. Correspondance went like this:


MY QUESTION:

I have spent the last hour searching for how to setup the FTP backup on my server so that I can use backup. After scouring your help, help on plesk, googled etc. I still can't see how to setup the IP address that seems to be required here. I'm sure this information is available somewhere but I have to admit defeat in trying to find it.

FTP Backup Info:
User Name: pbright
IP Address: Pending Setup
Disk Quota: 10 GB
Quota Used: 0.000 GB


THEIR ANSWER

To access your FTP Backup information and/or reset the password:

First, log into your customer account:

• Go to the Go Daddy Account Login Page
• Log in using your account username (which may be the same as your customer number) and password

If you have trouble logging in, our password reset form may help you. You can find this form through the following link:

Account Retrieval Page

• Click ‘Dedicated & Virtual Dedicated Servers’ under the ‘Hosting & Email’ menu at the top
• Click ‘Launch Manager’ for the server you wish to manage
• Click the 'FTP Backup' option
• Your backup server IP address, username and password reset option will be presented.

HOW I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO RESPOND, BUT WAS TOO POLITE TO DO SO

Yes you idiot, I sent you the text from that page and as you can see, if you could only read, there is no IP address, it says Pending Setup, that is why I contacted you.

This has now been forwarded to Advanced Technical Support.



Much more seriously, I suddenly cannot ssh or ftp to the server, although everything appears to work fine,

I sent them an email saying I cannot ssh

MY QUESTION

About 10 hours ago I was able to ssh onto my server fine. Went to bed and now trying to start work and I get permission denied when trying to access server via ssh.

eg The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh pbright@72.167.98.15
pbright@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
pbright@72.167.98.15's password:

Same with editor and database package.
Can access Plesk control panel
Websites are running fine
Have restarted server

I have not changed anything since last night, so why can't I ssh suddenly????

THEIR RESPONSE

We do not modify your password and using the credentials on file we are not able to access your server. We suggest resetting your root SSH password from within your server account manager. This will not change your Plesk password. You may want to review your server logs for any additional information.
....

I DID THAT

It didn't work, so I reponded

Reset password as suggested. Still not letting me in. Tried ssh as
both admin and root with the new password and neither works.

The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh admin@72.167.98.15
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive).
The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh root@72.167.98.15
root@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@72.167.98.15's password:

The Plesk password remains unchanged. I suspect this is not a
password issue but have not idea where to look. Nobody else has
access to this server so nothing that I have control over could have
been changed to make it suddenly stop allowing me permission. Any
other ideas?

AND WOULD YOU BELIVE THE RESPONSE

Thank you for contacting Server Support.

When logging into SSH you will need to use your server user name and then switch to the root user. So accessing SSH from the terminal will look like this :

ssh pbright@72.167.98.15

You will need to switch to the root account by running the following command once you are logged into SSH with your normal user :


su -


It will then prompt you for your password which is the same password as the one you used to login to SSH.

HARD TO KNOW HOW TO RESPOND

But I continue to be polite:

But I can't login to SSH, that is my problem.

I awaite their response with interest, but in the meantime and switching to myhost.ie. Here is their response to my question about who does their support:


What kind of support do you provide and is it your own staff or outsourced?

We use a combination. Our immediate staff is Irish based but we use the expertise of a UK company for a lot of our PLESK support.

We have been partered with them for over 5 years now and have a good relationship built, we also have our foot in the door with the SW SOFT developers (the guys who developed PLESK and Virtuozzo) so we have a good peg above a lot of PLESK providors in that respect.

We also have techs working 24x7 so urgent matters can be handled.


In saying that , our VPS ranges come unmanaged as well as managed so depending on what option you go for determines what level of support is delivered.

Will report on how I get on....

GoDaddy Support Poor - Moving to MyHost.ie

Am finding the support provided by Godaddy, both their online information and the people providing email support frustratingly inadequate. For example, I want to use the FTP backup facility provided. Nowhere does it tell me how to set it up so I sent in an email support request. Correspondance went like this:


MY QUESTION:

I have spent the last hour searching for how to setup the FTP backup on my server so that I can use backup. After scouring your help, help on plesk, googled etc. I still can't see how to setup the IP address that seems to be required here. I'm sure this information is available somewhere but I have to admit defeat in trying to find it.

FTP Backup Info:
User Name: pbright
IP Address: Pending Setup
Disk Quota: 10 GB
Quota Used: 0.000 GB


THEIR ANSWER

To access your FTP Backup information and/or reset the password:

First, log into your customer account:

• Go to the Go Daddy Account Login Page
• Log in using your account username (which may be the same as your customer number) and password

If you have trouble logging in, our password reset form may help you. You can find this form through the following link:

Account Retrieval Page

• Click ‘Dedicated & Virtual Dedicated Servers’ under the ‘Hosting & Email’ menu at the top
• Click ‘Launch Manager’ for the server you wish to manage
• Click the 'FTP Backup' option
• Your backup server IP address, username and password reset option will be presented.

HOW I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO RESPOND, BUT WAS TOO POLITE TO DO SO

Yes you idiot, I sent you the text from that page and as you can see, if you could only read, there is no IP address, it says Pending Setup, that is why I contacted you.

This has now been forwarded to Advanced Technical Support.



Much more seriously, I suddenly cannot ssh or ftp to the server, although everything appears to work fine,

I sent them an email saying I cannot ssh

MY QUESTION

About 10 hours ago I was able to ssh onto my server fine. Went to bed and now trying to start work and I get permission denied when trying to access server via ssh.

eg The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh pbright@72.167.98.15
pbright@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
pbright@72.167.98.15's password:

Same with editor and database package.
Can access Plesk control panel
Websites are running fine
Have restarted server

I have not changed anything since last night, so why can't I ssh suddenly????

THEIR RESPONSE

We do not modify your password and using the credentials on file we are not able to access your server. We suggest resetting your root SSH password from within your server account manager. This will not change your Plesk password. You may want to review your server logs for any additional information.
....

I DID THAT

I didn't work, so I reponded

Reset password as suggested. Still not letting me in. Tried ssh as
both admin and root with the new password and neither works.

The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh admin@72.167.98.15
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
admin@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive).
The-Main-Man:~ phoebebr$ ssh root@72.167.98.15
root@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@72.167.98.15's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
root@72.167.98.15's password:

The Plesk password remains unchanged. I suspect this is not a
password issue but have not idea where to look. Nobody else has
access to this server so nothing that I have control over could have
been changed to make it suddenly stop allowing me permission. Any
other ideas?

AND WOULD YOU BELIVE THE RESPONSE

Thank you for contacting Server Support.

When logging into SSH you will need to use your server user name and then switch to the root user. So accessing SSH from the terminal will look like this :

ssh pbright@72.167.98.15

You will need to switch to the root account by running the following command once you are logged into SSH with your normal user :


su -


It will then prompt you for your password which is the same password as the one you used to login to SSH.

HARD TO KNOW HOW TO RESPOND

But I continue to be polite:

But I can't login to SSH, that is my problem.

I awaite their response with interest, but in the meantime and switching to myhost.ie. Here is their response to my question about who does their support:


What kind of support do you provide and is it your own staff or outsourced?

We use a combination. Our immediate staff is Irish based but we use the expertise of a UK company for a lot of our PLESK support.

We have been partered with them for over 5 years now and have a good relationship built, we also have our foot in the door with the SW SOFT developers (the guys who developed PLESK and Virtuozzo) so we have a good peg above a lot of PLESK providors in that respect.

We also have techs working 24x7 so urgent matters can be handled.


In saying that , our VPS ranges come unmanaged as well as managed so depending on what option you go for determines what level of support is delivered.

Will report on how I get on....

Birds in Snow - Jan 2008

Real snow in West Cork. Only last a short time, but this unusual event not enough to put the birds of the feeder.

Energy from Rain!

What do we have in plenty in West Cork?  For anyone living here at the moment, the answer comes easily to mind.  Rain, rain, rain.

http://www.physorg.com/news120216714.html

This new device can convert the energy from a falling raindrop into electricity.  Their calculation for France, and I'm sure we can do much better, is 1 Wh per square meter per year.  So if I covered my whole roof, that would be 50 Wh per year.  Would that be enough to boil a kettle? 

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