Just few days ago, I wrote a post on making a live Ubuntu usb disk in three easy steps. Integrating a live USB maker tool into Ubuntu default installation has been one of the popular requests on brainstorm site.

USBLive Ubuntu

A new application USBLive has started showing up in Ibex beta. As you might have guessed, this handy tool helps you to make pizza. Just kidding! Of course, it allows you to make a USB bootable disk with Ubuntu in it. Just give the source image (.iso) file or insert a live CD, plug-in your USB drive, adjust the space to be reserved by the default installation, and click Make Startup Disk. How easy as that? You can access USBLive from System>Administration>Create Startup Disk menu

Another system tool that has been included is System Cleaner. It cleans up your system to make it

System Cleaner

‘kinda-new’. You can clean all the installed applications or select only those which you are not going to use any more. Access System Cleaner from Applications>System Tools>System Cleaner menu At first, you might think removing the applications can already be done with Add/Remove tool. So, what’s the difference? Nothing! It just gives you a list of those applications which you have installed after running up Ubuntu for the first time. No confusions whatsoever. It comes very handy when, for an example, you don’t want to poke the default applications but only want to remove those non-sense applications which you gave try few days ago. BTW, if you want to track all you apt activities, the ever useful tapt is always there.

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1. Create a bash script with the following contents

#!/bin/bash
VirtualBox -startvm NameOfYourVirtualOS

Replace yourSUPassword with your password, and NameOfYourVirtualOS with the name that you have given to your virtual OS in VirtualBox.

2. Name it something like windowsXPGDM (if you want to run Windows XP), make it executable, and then copy it to /usr/bin.

$ chmod 755 windowsXPGDM
$ sudo cp windowsXPGDM /usr/bin

2. Go to /usr/share/xsessions and create a new file with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=WindowsXP
Comment=My Virtual WindowsXP
Exec=/usr/bin/windowsXPGDM
Icon=
Type=Application

3. Save it with a name something like windowsXP.desktop.

4. Log out and you will see a new entry WindowsXP in your GDM session. You can now directly open VirtualBox session without even logging in to your Ubuntu machine.

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But wait! When I clicked the link to see my ‘winner post’ the site was down. I returned back to Digg to read comments. Everybody was complaining about the site being down and asking for a mirror. I checked my Inbox to see if there was anything from my hosting server. There was! This email from my hosting company LunarPages.com

Dear ashokgelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello Your account is utilizing excessive resources, causing a significant degradation of services on the server. This is a shared environment and we can not allow one user to utilize the majority of the resources on a server as it affects all users adversely. Because of this, we have temporarily suspended your script: SCRIPT_FILENAME=/home/…/index.php Bellow you have the usage details for your account netkh0 netkhabar.com 4.17 2.32 0.1 Top Process %CPU 50.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 39.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php Top Process %CPU 32.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /home/…/index.php CPU 4.17 MEMORY 2.32 MYSQL 0.1 Please note that the above mentioned resource usage is due to PHP processing.Please upgrade your scripts as soon as possible. Please let us know what changes you will be making to correct this issue and we can re-provide ownership of the script to you. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. Thanks. — Best Regards, Vlad Panainte Junior System Administrator 1 support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada ) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

I replied them saying that this was because one of my posts made to the front page of Digg.com. I was fast enough to set up another site http://backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com (it doesn’t exist anymore), and imported all the posts with comments and attachments from quicktweaks backend. I installed WP Super Cache plugin, enabled it and redirected quicktweaks.com to backup.quicktweaks.com. Everything went right. Aha! What a relief! But wait again! 403 Forbidden! I thought I messed up something because of WP-Cache. Again, to keep Diggers happy, I was quick to setup another site http://qtbackup.quicktweaks.com (it’s still there). As soon as I was done, I got the same error 403 Forbidden message. Fired up Fireftp and checked the permission. All the permissions were taken away from me.

My hosting server couldn’t handle the Digg effect, and it was getting hard for me to handle diggers’ comments. Luckily, only permission for the index.php file was taken away for quicktweaks.com. I decided to create a new file index2.php and setup a redirect to execute index2.php instead of index.php. To do so, I added the following lines in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    ^index\.php$  index2.php

It worked for about five minutes then immediately I got a new email notification. Who else it could be other than the LunarPages itself:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, Unfortunately, we have been forced to temporary suspend your account, as numerous folders were continuously having excessive apache connections, causing high stability to the server:
~/backuptweaks/ ~qtbackup/ Here is only a small cut from the list of connections that the folders were having at the moment: 2-0 6308 4/14/14 K 0.05 4 4 10.1 0.43 0.43 99.227.220.98 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com GET /wp-content/themes/personal/images/bg-older-posts.gif HTTP/ 3-0 6309 7/19/19 K 0.07 1 6 46.8 0.90 0.90 212.242.190.40 backuptweaks.quicktweaks.com
…
…
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

It meant that everything was down, I couldn’t even access my files. Other domains hosted with my same account were also down. I couldn’t access admin backend. Any page was redirected to their page with a notice which asked the webmaster to contact them. Once again I replied them saying this is nothing to do with script file but but because of so called Digg Effect. I asked them when will my site be back.   I  waited their reply for the whole day and finally got this:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Dear Customer, We really apologize for the inconvenience. You can log into your server here: https://mantus.lunarmania.com:2083 Please, let us know once you have updated your scripts so we can unsuspend your account. If you have any further questions we will gladly assist you. Thank you for your patience. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)

—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —

I replied with this:

Hi,
I’ve updated my scripts. Its not the fault in my script. Its just one of my articles made to the front page of Digg.com (I repeat!!!) and an unexpected huge amount of traffic diverted towards my site. I’ve never expected that LunarPages is only good enough to host a couple of pages and is only able to bear a handful of visitors. I’ve just installed cache mechanism plugins for my blog (based on wordpress) which means now as soon as a visitor visits a page, it will be cached and after that the page will be served as a static page instead of making request to the database. But for this to happen, my site needs to be up and I need to click few pages so that the cached pages are created. Today’s ’site unavailable’ incident really had a bad impact on my site where I lost a good chance of making my site recognized to a community. A hosting is of no use when it doesn’t allow a webmaster to make an opportunity to make his site famous among a certain group of people. Have I crossed the web space limit? No! Have I used all of the available bandwidth? No! So what’s the reason? You should have made clear before that you are not able to handle more than 10 visitors at a time. Why do you boast being so affordable and so stable hosting company? Why do you advertise shouting ‘unlimited webspace and bandwidth’ when you are not even closes to one gig of bandwidth? I do will write a blog on the useless and inability of LunarPages hosting and I hope that will hit the front page of Digg.com too. But before that would you please let my site take a breath? It might have been dying because of suffocation.
An unhappy customer who thinks that LunarPages hosting sucks!
Thank you anyways and I anticipate your prompt reply and action.

Two hours later I received this response:

Dear Ashok Gelal,
—- TECH RESPONSE STARTS HERE —-
Hello, I have unsuspended your account, please take necessary steps to lower your usage. If we found that your account is causing high usage then we will permanently suspend your account. If you require a higher usage then allowed on shared servers you might want to try a VPS/dedicated plans. Details on VPS or dedicated plans can be found here: http://www.lpdedicated.com Dedicated servers. http://www.lunarpages.com/virtual-private-server/ vps servers I hope this information is helpful. Please note that the acceptable usage range is 1.0% average %CPU or less, 1.0% average %Memory or less and Top Processes below 20%. Thanks. Best Regards, Jaskaran Sandhu Junior Systems Admin. support@lunarpages.com Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (U.S. & Canada – Toll-free) Phone: 1-714-521-8150 (International)
—- TECH RESPONSE ENDS HERE —-

Finally, all the permissions were given back to me. They had put their own .htaccess file and renamed my file to .htacess-suspended. I renamed their .htaccess file to .LunarPagesSucks

As of writing this, the site hasn’t gone down once although I’ve seen an increasing number of traffic most of them from Digg. StumbledUpon and Bookmarks both have sent some traffic too. One thing I don’t understand is that according to one comment from Digg, my site was down before 70 diggs and it was down for the whole day. But the post got dug for the whole day. Before the site was back, it had already received more than 500 Diggs. This made me believe that there are many of those people who blindly Digg a post without bothering to read it.
So what about revenue?
Some of you must be very eager to know about my adsense revenue. One thing I’ve noticed that the Diggers don’t click on any Adwords. The following reports speak themselves:

Lesson learned:

1. If you submit a post to Digg, get prepared.
2. Enable caching for your site. After installing WP-Cache I’ve felt that the page is loading much faster.
3. Never think that you are going to earn lots of money with Adwords. Diggers love reading not clicking your adwords.
4. Never use cheap hosting. When you want to get a hosting account, don’t look for bandwidth or web space. Ask them if they are able to bear Digg Effect.
5. I don’t know about others but LunarPages.com sucks. It can’t even handle 60+ diggs. How shame!

Stat:

Time to bring my site back again: About 16 hours

Time to write the blog and post it: 2 hours

Time to make to the front page: About 14 hours

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A friend of mine writes “…when I open some heavy sites with Firefox, my Ubuntu desktop gets freeze. I can’t close the Firefox so I find no other way than to restart my system. Aren’t there any other ways to unfreeze the system without restarting?”
Yes there are!


The most efficient way to unfreeze your system is to be patience. Don’t try to open other applications, when your system is not responding. Don’t press unnecessary keys. Go have a cup of coffee, get fresh and get back. You system might have already been unfrozen or a dialog box might be waiting for you to click on that Force Quit button. (I promise you won’t be greeted by BSOD!)

If you don’t have much patience or your system just can’t unfreeze automatically, then follow these steps:

1. Hit Caps Lock or Num Lock keys to see if your keyboard is responding, if it isn’t than you’re out of luck.
2. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2, you will be taken to a black&white terminal window. It will ask you for your username and password.
3. Type the following command to get the PID (process ID) of the program that is not responding (in this example Firefox)
   ps -A | grep firefox
4. It will display you the PID of firefox. You should get at least two PIDs something similar to:
   5961 ? 00:00:00 firefox-2
   5977 ? 00:01:12 firefox-2-bin
5. Now issue the following command to kill the non-responding firefox (its PID is 5977 in this example)
   kill 5977
   [update: If you hate working with numbers you can also kill the non-responding program by issuing: killall firefox-2-bin]
6. Re-check that you have successfully killed the non-responding program:
   ps -A | grep firefox
7. If it doesn’t show you anything, then you are done. To exit and get back to your Graphical System, press Ctrl+Alt+F7

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