Cactus-Mall Blog

A highly recommended read

2009-01-13T16:38:00.001Z

Mesa Garden retail seedlist 2009

2009-01-12T18:43:00.001Z

This list has just been posted on the Mesa Garden Website

MACE Partnership accounts

2009-01-12T16:53:00.001Z

Suzanne has to complete our business account by the end of January. Please avoid interrupting her except in matter of great urgency.

Our property development project

2008-12-18T19:12:00.002Z

Our property development project is now dead so we will not be moving. The planning process appeal was refused although the remaining issues were fairly minor and probably could have been fixed. Meanwhile the project has become no longer financially viable so that we have had to say we are no longer interested.

It is now probable that I will have to continue working until the age of 70 and we will have to put increasing efforts into the continued running of our business. This may involve some re-evaluation of our other commitments.

Connection problem

2008-12-11T14:40:00.001Z

Approximately mid-day Tuesday 9th our Broadband hub and local area network hub went down, probably through a failed power supply. This took all our computers off-line and isolated them from talking to each other. Unfortunately our backup systems were found to be inadequate. I had failed to appreciate how many software systems these days are unable to operate with without internet or local area network connections. We have therefore been unable to do any of our routine work for the last 48 hours. In spite of being on a 24 hour contract it has taken 48 hours to obtain replacement equipment. I will have to review this arrangemnet in due course.

We have a large backlog of work built up so please allows us to catch up before chasing us further.

Server disk reconfiguration

2008-10-20T17:46:00.001+01:00

Tomorrow (21st October) the server will be down for approximately 30 minutes while the disks are reconfigured to allow the databases more room to grow.

CSSA Website

2008-09-09T16:49:00.002+01:00

We are pleased to announce that the website of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America has returned to hosting on the Cactus-Mall server and that I am taking over duties as its webmaster.

There will be a period of learning on my part as I become familiar with the systems that this website now operates under as these are not ones I have used before.

eMail problems

2008-08-11T13:22:00.002+01:00

Very bad 'Joe Job' again this morning. Bounce messages from some dammned Russian spammer coming in faster than I can process deletes for several hours now. Makes it impossible to download and reply to genuine emails.

Our house redevelopment project

2008-08-07T11:13:00.002+01:00

We learned yesterday that our project is still live. There are further delays because our property developer has closed about 80% of their offices and made many staff redundant including the manager that was handling our development. We cannot in the current financial climate be totally confident that it will go through, but prospects are at least a little more positive.

More on Junk Mail

2008-08-07T11:05:00.002+01:00

Both Suzanne and I are experiencing very heavy junk mail problems at the moment on the mail boxes we receive. Much of this is bounced spam from somebody who has kindly sent out spam with our domains as the return address. This is hard to filter automatically without losing genuine bounce messages. To give you some idea of the scale I received almost 2000 in the period from midnight last night to 7am this morning. The biggest danger is accidental deleting of genuine email while clearing out this rubbish, so if you have sent me an imortant email and not received and answer please send it again.

Junk mail

2008-06-20T09:01:00.002+01:00

Backlog this morning just over 21,000. Down but still over 4 times normal. Several identified dumpings of junk yesterday including about 2,000 on Suzanne's email address.

Fixed the errant computer - more idiot design from Microsoft, attempting to prevent users properly controlling their computers. Finally fixed with the XP repair console by booting from CD.

Server junk mail load problems

2008-06-19T16:57:00.003+01:00

The problems with junk mail load have grown steadily worse over the last week. Yesterday the backlog of mail to be sent ( 99.9% bounces ) exceeded 26,000. There is evidence that this is starting to cause problems with delayed mail processing and even possible loss of emails. I have been battling to get this load down over the last 24 hours, having two computers more or less continuously deleting mail marked spam by spam assassin. I have reduced the load to 22,500 but now one of my local computers is playing up, overheating and continually rebooting itself.

If you have large amounts of junk mail stored on our server it would help me greatly if you could delete some of it.

Work load

2008-06-12T08:29:00.002+01:00

We have at the moment an extremely heavy work load. This is not related to the Cactus-Mall and web work but is coming from the other side of our business, that of printing. We cannot in our present poor financial position afford to turn away any business.

Problems with the project

2008-06-12T08:17:00.002+01:00

I have written here and in other places about the project to develop our property, move and solve our financial problems. Unfortunately the current shambles in the UK property market is severely impacting this project. It may still go ahead but the financial advantage from what is going to be an enormous amount of disruption and work is being severely eroded.

It is now looking increasingly unlikely that we we will be able to go to the CSSA convention in Tucson in 2009.

Server spam load

2008-06-12T08:12:00.002+01:00

The server cactus-mall.net is experiencing exceptionally high loads of incoming Spam - about 2.5 times the avergae amount for the last 2-3 months. Whilst this is not currently causing problems it would be helpful is any users with stored mailboxes on the server clean them out regularly and don't let junk accumulate.

Problems today

2008-06-03T15:49:00.002+01:00

Today has been somewhat of a disaster. At approximately 9.30am our electrical power dipped and immediately returned. The computers tripped but did not turn off completely. Of the four I had on none would work properly, spontaneously rebooting and coming with a whole variety of errors. After a little work I realised there was something seriously wrong with the power as none of our fluorescent lights would work. I measured the voltage at 165V. Way below the legal requirement and extremely dangerous to electronic and safety equiment. I therefore shut everything down completely

We have only just been returned to proper power at just before 4 pm and we have lost most of a days work.

cactus mall server outage 31.5.08

2008-05-31T11:38:00.000+01:00

Apologies for an outage on the server earlier today.

The immediate cause was a jump in load of the CPUs by 150X. I am investigating the why this happened.

Thanks to Yann who first spotted this and got the server rebooted. I did get a warning message about this problem but by the time I had read it this morning the problem was already fixed.

Another big task

2008-04-20T17:30:00.003+01:00

You may think things have gone quiet on the cactus-mall front. Unfortunately I have been presented with another large slice of unprofitable but essential work.

eBay have decided at fairly short notice to drop Commission Junction as the tracking system for their affiliate programme. This results in my having to change all eBay affiliate links on about half a dozen websites. Since this generates a fair bit of income for us it is essential this is completed as soon as possible. It is particularly annoying that although eBay want all this work done by the end of the month they have not even got all the necessary modified tools available yet and the documentation is even further behind.

Typical!

MAIL PROBLEMS

2008-04-04T12:14:00.001+01:00

My main mailserver PC refuses to connect the network (either local or Internet) this morning. This is limiting my ability to send or recieve email. I am working on fixing it.

MSG PayPal account

2008-02-28T08:05:00.001Z

The MSG PayPal account has finally been unfrozen. This does not reduce my intention to limit use of their 'services' to the absolute minimum.

Paypal problems continue on MSG account

2008-02-27T21:05:00.002Z

We are still no nearer to solving the freezing of the MSG PayPal account.

In spite of numerous emails and faxing documents the MSG PayPal account is still frozen.

I have blocked all further payments to this account and closed another PayPal account. Uses of the PayPal virtual terminal by three customers will no longer be advocated.

This organisation apparently has a death wish and will find that that they may contract even faster they have grown. PayPal and its parent company eBay think that their monopoly postion protects them from normal commercial competition. PayPal apparently moved from the UK to Luxembourg to avoid the regulation of the UK's FSA and now don't even employ UK lawyers to avoid legal papers being served against them. So much for the Common market.

I am afraid PayPal's behaviour is yet another example of the sickness infesting USA business and I fear that the current USA government and any possible sucessors will be too weak or too unwilling to sort this out.

A busy weekend

2008-02-25T17:41:00.003Z

We had a very busy weekend.

It started on Friday evening, with a Zone 12 (Sussex) committee meeting here. Unfortunately 4 members of this already very small committee were unable to attend. The prime business discussed was the forthcoming Derek Desborough memorial lecture to be held at the usual Crawley meeting place on the 13th April starting at 1pm. Graham Charles will be giving two lectures, one on Copiapoas in habitat and the other on South American habitats under threat. Tickets including afternoon refreshments (available from us) and including refreshments will be £4 booked beforehand and £5 on the day.

On Saturday evening we were speaking at Woking branch. It was very nice to see a strong attendance. It seems that the new cactus display at Wisley is having a very positive effect on this branch and there were 4 members of the Wisley staff in the audience.

On Sunday there was very rare occurrence of an MSG 'organisers' meeting. This was primarily to organise the MSG event taking place in Banstead on the 27th September.

The MSG has also managed to get its act together and will be having a stand at the National Show. The staging time makes this quite difficult to organise and we are relying on people arriving early enough on the Saturday morning to put the stand together. We will be totally involved in BCSS publication sales and won't be able to assist. We need volunteers from the MSG membership to both bring plants and man the stand during the day.

MSG membership continues to look healthy with renewals and new members substantially up on last year.

We finally had an unexpected visit from John Gander who stayed with us overnight on his way back from the Northampton Zone to Cornwall.

I have finally got my new computer operational and now have two systems on my desk. This is much much more powerful than anything we have had previously and I finding extremely useful to have access to two systems at once, although remembering which mouse to use sometimes confuses me. We now have a total of five systems and more redundancy than I have ever had before.

We have finished the migration of a new customer (the first since we moved to the new server www.cactiguide.com. This is a very large system which we are pleased to provide hosting for.

Some problems resolved

2008-02-21T10:28:00.004Z

We have installed a new flat screen monitor and are back to having a safety margin of a backup computer. I have ordered parts to finish of our new upgrade computer and that ought to be fully operational within a few days.

Finally a number of awkward technical problems have been solved and the support load resulting from the server migration is showing signs of tailing off. We have new mini migration to cope with in that the server will be migrating to pHp5/MySQL5 sometime next month. This does result on some work being needed for some sites but the number is a fairly small proportion of the total.

We have some further problems generated by PayPal which is affecting the MSG account. In the past I have always promoted PayPal as a good solution for small organisations accepting on-line payments. After having the MSG PayPal account frozen for no apparent reason I am having strong doubts. The methods for unfreezing the account on-line simply do not work and lead you round in circles, emails are ignored. We eventually spoke to a real person at PayPal who requested the faxing of various documents, but nothing has yet happened after three days. Looking around the net reveals that PayPal is getting a terrible reputation for doing this. I suspect they have grown too big too fast and think themselves invulnerable to competition. What they may not realise is how much harm a bad reputation is doing their future business. I had no lees than three virtual terminal systems which may have come about in the near future. I don't think I can now possibly advise organisations to trust all their credit card business to PayPal. Anyone operating a PayPal account I would recommend to keep no more than the minimum balance in the account.

We don't have a lot of money frozen in the account but I would suggest that if you are sending money to the MSG you use the direct credit card system for the moment.

A horrible end to a horrible week

2008-02-16T17:12:00.004Z

It has been a bad day today following up on a very difficult week which had far too many problems.

Today computer hardware problems have caught up with me bigtime. Over the period of the server migration period a few problems have occurred which I largely ignored as not being too important. One disk drive went down in a more modern computer I am building to replace an older one. Another developed funny video problems which I treaced to overheating as it only appeared after the computer had been on all day. I solved it temporarily by leaving the case open and ordered another fan to fit when I had a moment.

This morning when I started up, one computer screen went phut - it is pretty old and I suspect the power supply has failed. After checking the fuses, I switched it out for the screen on the spare computer. I thought I better get the fan fitted on the overheating machine. Went in easily but the computer instead of loading windows properly came up with the helpful message that it was ok to turn the computer off. After much fiddling and cursing I eventually found the video driver was corrupted. Like most windows problems once you have found the problem all sorts of other things have gone wrong and it took me 4 hours to get the system back into a usable state. Some things still remain to be fixed, but it is essentially operational.

I am now back to three working systems which is the minimum I need to operate everything. A new screen is on order which should get me back to the position of having a 'spare'.

Internet problem

2008-02-14T09:19:00.002Z

The internet routing problems which made it almost impossible to contact our server and much else in Texas were resolved after about an hour and the server was again contactable at about 12.00 midnight GMT.
Everything seems to be ok this morning.

It was exteremely unfortunate that at the time of the outage Yann and I were trying to fix problems caused by a misconfiguration by the Hostgator support staff which was affecting a number of domains. I think this is now all done, but please contact me if you still have problems with your website.