I ran the blue (the longest course on offer) taking just under 45 minutes for 7 km. It’s a lovely bit of forest to run in with nothing but beech leaves on much of the forest floor (although they did rather too good a job of hiding the marshes in places). I can’t claim a clean run with a bit of hunting for controls sunk in pits but it was enough to see off the competition. Most importantly though, it was a lovely day with blue skies and warm sunshine and everyone enjoyed their day out.
Fun in the sun
March 21st, 2011Back online
March 20th, 2011Shortly after moving my blog to an EC2 instance I received an ominous email stating:
We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure.
The risk of your instances failing is increased at this point. We cannot determine the health of any applications running on the instances. We recommend that you launch replacement instances and start migrating to them.
After a bit of searching around it seemed that, as my instance is EBS backed, I should just need to stop it and restart it and, in all likelihood, it would move to another host. Sounded simple enough but the stop seemed to be taking forever. After downloading the command line tools I tried to force the stop but still no luck – except when I logged in again the following night it was finally showing as stopped. Unfortunately, when I tried to start it I received the following error: “Server.InternalError: Internal error on launch”.
I posted a question on the EC2 forum and, as you can see, was told that the root volume was in an “abnormal attachment state”. You’ll also see that my attempts to force a detach via the AWS Management Console appeared to fail or at least, the console thought the volume was still attached and therefore wouldn’t let me reattach it. Reverting to the command line utilities again allowed me to successfully detach and reattach the volume and then start the instance. Another delay whilst the DNS refresh took effect (perhaps I should try out an Elastic IP) and, about three days after I first hit stop, the site is finally back online. I’m putting it down as a learning experience!
Southern Champion
March 14th, 2011On Sunday, I left the rest of the family to go to Manor Farm Country Park whilst I got a lift to the Southern Champs, taking place on the Hambleden Estate near Henley-on-Thames. It made a pleasant change having time to prepare before the start of the race although I still had to go back for the Emit brick I left behind. I enjoyed my run as Hambleden is a delightfully runnable area (if you discount the hills) and I had no pain from my dodgy knee. I only messed up two controls: two minutes at number 10 (see RouteGadget for the near miss) and half a minute at the penultimate control. On the long (~3km) leg, after taking time to examine the map on the previous leg, I ended up going pretty straight. It will be interesting to see whether anyone ran faster taking the long flatt(er) route going south and then coming in from the east.
I was 1st out of 5 when I finished but results were delayed and we headed off before the prize giving. Still no results when I went to bed so it was a pleasant surprise to have an email in the morning from a club-mate indicating that they had picked up my M35L trophy. So, growing older has its benefits. The only fly in the ointment? Richard Barrett took nearly 5 minutes less on the same course as an M40. Looks like I still have some work to do over the next 5 years!
Febrile seizure
March 10th, 2011Duncan’s nursery phoned on Monday morning to say that he was running a temperature. I agreed that they could give him Calpol and phoned again later, by which time his temperature had subsided, he’d slept, and had eaten his lunch. The next call I had was from Christine who had gone to pick up Duncan at the end of the day and discovered an ambulance car parked outside. Duncan had experienced a short seizure (1-2 minutes) and they we’re going to transfer him (along with Christine and Emma) by ambulance to Winchester Hospital. I pedalled over to the nursery, picked up the car and followed them in. They had given him more Calpol and followed this up with Ibuprofen in A&E which brough his temperature back down again from 39 degrees. After several hours of the usual NHS procrastination he was finally transferred to the children’s ward where Christine spent the night with him. Emma and I returned the following morning to bring them home (after a good play with the toys on the ward). The verdict? A febrile seizure. As the NHS site states “frightening but harmless”. He may be susceptible and we need to watch his temperature more closely in future but, either way, he will grow out of it by five. What surprised me most is that, although between three and five percent of children suffer one of these seizures, this was a first for the nusery. In many ways though, we’re glad it happened there rather than at home as they undoubtedly dealt with the situation much more calmly than we would have done.
Server hacked
March 9th, 2011When attempting to post the image for my last blog entry, it failed to be resized. When I logged in to the server to see what was up with ImageMagick, I didn’t appear to have permission to execute ls. Or ps. Or netstat… A quick Google suggested that these were the hallmarks of a rootkit attack. Unfortunately the files had been modified prior to the oldest Slicehost backup that I had. At this point I realised the server was still running Intrepid, limiting my chances of picking up packages to detect and remove rootkits. After a reboot of the server I discovered that I had lost all connectivity. Booting up a Slicehost rescue image I was able to retrieve all of the data I needed. Now to get things up and running again. Earlier in the year I had been playing around with a free micro-instance on EC2 and this seemed like the ideal opportunity to switch across. The instance is running Apache rather than nginx as on my Slicehost image. This needed a bit of tuning down to prevent segmentation faults. Everything seems to be running smoothly now. I just need to switch the DNS records away from Slicehost and then I’m done.
London sightseeing
March 5th, 2011Emma was keen to see the dinosaurs after a previous encounter at the Pitt Rivers in Oxford. We then went on to look at the mammals (including the life size blue whale) and the creepy crawlies. Duncan also seemed to love the museum although that may just have been the chance to run freely from one brightly lit case to the next. There was bright sunshine when we emerged but we dived down in to the underground (all part of the experience) back to Westminster and then walked back to Waterloo, just about beating the commuter rush back home.
There are a few photos on Flickr. I would have taken more but the auto-focus on my kit lens seems to have packed in. Thankfully it’s still under warranty.
Longleat Tiger
January 28th, 2011Going strapless
January 26th, 2011This week’s Tuesday night entertainment was the undulating run. Stewart looked to be making a bid to step in to Neil’s shoes, showing us a clean pair of heels as we crossed over the common but it later transpired that he needed to get back for an appointment. Makes me wonder how fast he would go if he was trying! And ‘going strapless’? My Garmin watch strap broke just as we set off. I’m still trying to decide whether to replace it like-for-like, go for the velcro option, or perhaps go for the wrist/bike mount…
RSS - Posts