by Doug Coulter » Sun May 04, 2014 12:48 pm
I *might* be able to have shell access. We're on Ipower as an ISP and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you the deal I locked in right at the .com bust - I pay around 50 bucks a year, for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth - forever, guaranteed (guess who was desparate for cash just then?). No reason to move off that, eh? We're running some version of linux (they chose the version) probably on a virtual machine, with Apache/PHPBB/MySQL as far as I can discover. I can read the logs, but I've not done so in the last couple years. They have a lot of GUI type tools on the front end, and I can FTP into the site from here - haven't tried any other way.
Most of our transient errors have to do with the SQL server going away, but it has a strong tendency to come back up on its own in a short time. This "board goes disabled" is the nasty one, since I do have to notice and then manually fix it.
The fear is that while I do program time-deterministic opsys and apps to the highest possible level in uP's (usually so they can feed a PC app, which will never be time-deterministic due to pre-emptive multitasking, but can keep up and write it down on a disk or analyze things - using the uP's timestamps as the PC ones can at best, record when the PC got the data, not when it actually occurred or was measured), the level of all this "big" stuff and the potential complexity of messing with it and screwing up some hidden parameter that has to be right for it to keep working scares me off "just trying stuff" as we have a lot to lose. EG, I'm really a programmer, not a sysadmin, and do as little of that type thing as I can get away with, so I don't know a ton about it on these "higher level" things.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.