Category Archives: Administrative

SoCal Verizon

Anyone else having slow connection problems? I’m dropping packets, and some sites (e.g., National Review) are timing out. I’ve also had to reboot my modem a couple times today (I’m on FIOS). There’s a half-hour wait time for help on chat.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here is the chat session so far:

Chat Subject:Slow Throughput
Your Question:Slow connection.
A Verizon Service Representative will be with you shortly. Thank you. (17:37:58)
Agent Kapil has joined. (17:38:13)
Kapil : Chat ID for this session is 08291149279. (17:38:13)
Me (17:38:24): Dropping packets, have to repeatedly reboot modem.
Kapil(17:38:29): Thank you for contacting Verizon HSI Technical Support. My name is Kapil and I am the technical support analyst assigned to help you. Please stay online for a few moments while I review the information generated by your trouble ticket.
Kapil(17:39:05): As you are having a FIOS account. Please stay online with me while I connect you to our FIOS department.
This session is being transferred. (17:39:15)
17:54:53 Estimated wait time is 5 mins 15 secs. We apologize for the delay. You are 22 nd in the queue.
Me (17:39:55): 36m wait time? That tells me I’m not the only one…
Me (17:46:33): OK, time is jumping around.
Me (17:51:39): OK, now what how much time?
Me (17:52:27): If there are still 21 ahead of me in the queue, it’s hard to see how it will only be three and a half minutes.
Me (17:54:19): Hello?
Me (17:54:24): I have a life.
Me (17:54:53): Now the time is back up to five minutes. No, six. This is ridiculous.
Me (17:57:01): OK, now it’s back to 21 minutes.
Me (17:57:37): If I were just working, I might keep an eye on this, but I have to make dinner.
Me (17:59:06): This is pointless. I have no idea how long it will be until I get help. Closing this effing chat window, so I can get back to life.

My Office Is Broken

Open Office, that is, on Fedora 14. I click on a document to open it, or try opening from the menu, and it says “starting open office,” spins an icon for a few seconds, and then nothing. I tried removing and reinstalling, and no change. I recently did an update on my Nvidia drivers, which included a new kernel. I of course had to reboot (something I am always loathe to do). I think that’s when the problem started. Any ideas out there? This is really an emergency. If I can’t get it fixed, I may have to do a lot of my writing on a different machine, maybe even a Microsoft one, and one not in my office.

Web Server Bleg

Geek Alert for this post.

I’m running a web server app on my computer, which I can address by http://localhost:8080/webapp, where “webapp” is the app.

It works fine, but in theory, I should be able to access it from another machine on the network via http://localhostIP:8080/webapp, where “localhostIP” is the IP address of my machine, but I can’t. It just times out.

I’ve even installed Apache on the machine, and I’ve set up a reverse proxy in the Apache config file per the following:


ProxyRequests On


Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 192.168

#Set up reverse proxy for Webapp server

ProxyPass /webapp/ http://localhost:8080/webapp/
ProxyPassReverse /webapp/ http://localhost:8080/webapp/
ProxyPreserveHost On

Again, where “webapp” is the actual webserver that I’m trying to access remotely.

When I try to access this from either a remote, or my local machine, by http://localhostIP/webapp, I get the message: “The requested URL /webapp was not found on this server.”

Any Apache gurus who can tell me what the problem might be? I’ve opened up firewall to both http and https.

[Update Friday morning]

Problem solved. As noted in comments, it was a combination of allowed ports and SELinux.

Twit

I just noticed that I have almost thirty followers on Twitter, even though I have only tweeted once since joining a couple years ago. I was feeling a little guilty, so I’ve set up my RSS at the blog to feed it. I may or may not start actually manually tweeting in the future, but at least there’s some content there now.

Light Posting

Conference is over, and Patricia and I are driving down the coast highway. We’ll be stopping in Cambria tonight, and then back to LA tomorrow. I might keep an eye on things with my phone, but I won’t be posting much, if at all. Be good in comments.