Toil and trouble
January 7th, 2007 by lafnlabSo I stayed awake most of the night, creating the finest hand-crafted code for the ZenPhoto gallery. Toiling away at CSS to make the gallery emulate the look and feel of the WordPress theme. It was going fairly well. Usually, I would make a few changes to the CSS or a PHP file, then upload the changed files and refresh the browser to see how they work. I got the stylesheet about 85% of where I wanted it, then I started getting errors while uploading.
It was telling me I was out of disk space, which I thought was ridiculous. I login to the control panel for my web host and see that I was only using about 70 MB out of 1 GB available for my account, so I had a long way to go to run out of disk space. I SSH’d in to my account and checked around. I’d never used SSH in any signifcant amounts before, so mostly I was seeing what could be done. Basically it’s like a modern version of telnet, though the best way to describe it is a command line interface to a remote computer. If you are comfortable with the command line, it’s a pretty nice tool. When I was logged in with SSH, I tried another command that was new to me – df. In *nix, df is a very basic program that tells how much disk space is being used and how much is available. In this case it was very useful because it showed the main hard drive for the server was full.
I typed ps -A to take a look at the processes running, and it came up with a slew of multiple instances of similar daemons running – httpd, mysqld, and qmail were the most common. This shouldn’t be unusual since it is a webhost and the server hosts multiple domains, but I think the number of instances was a bit excessive. In SSH, I was able to look around the server and see the other domains the server hosted. I couldn’t access them due to *nix user space issues, but I could see the names. It looked like there were maybe a dozen or so websites listed, though there were around a hundred “user” directories. The number of redundant processes seemed excessive when compared to this.
I tried various things over the next few hours, with no luck. I couldn’t do anything but wait. If it happened during “normal” hours, I would have gone and done laundry, but since it was the wee hours of the morning, I didn’t want to wake the neighbors. I ended up taking a nap. When I woke up, the site at least seemed to be working though there were still some database issues. After another hour or so, that went away. I was able to upload without any errors, and I am able to write this post.
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