Wesley's Tool-Box

I've reported about the server losing connection after a bit of idling time yesterday, and the culprit was the power management settings. Surprisingly, my Mac mini was set to go into power saving mode just ten minutes after idling. I'm not sure what kept it up before, but it certainly isn't kept awake now. So I set the setting to never go fall asleep. Now the connection doesn't drop.

I thought this was the end of troubles, but it turns out that the server now takes a long time to respond after several minutes of idling. Once it responds, subsequent pages load just fine. I haven't found out why this was the case, but I know it's not a DNS lookup issue because there's no delay while there is network activity on the Mac.

So I devised a way to work around this issue by automatically causing a small network activity every minute. After opening Terminal:

crontab -e

[Press "i"]

00-59 * * * * /sbin/ping -c 1 -n google.com > /dev/null/

[Press "Esc" button]
[Press "!wq"]

And that's it. Once this is done, the system starts doing a ping once every minute silently. So far, it's working nicely and the website loads fine regardless of idling time.

There have been some network issues in the last few days. The major culprit turned out to be the 100Mbps Ethernet hub I've been using for more than five years (NEXT-8305SH). It doesn't "switch" the network connection over the ports properly anymore.

That has now been replaced with a ipTIME H5005 Gigabit Ethernet hub. I don't think the internet connection is that fast yet, but it's better to futureproof things. However, I've been noticing that the connection to the server is lost after some idling time after the new hub has been put into place. I'm not sure what's causing this and am trying to find out now.

Today marks the return of The Toon-Box, the comic that ran for four years from August 23, 2005 to July 29, 2009 and went into hiatus for more than four years since. With Comic Life software that made the comic possible available on iOS for some time, all it needed was motivation to resurrect the comic.

So yes, now the comic is fully created on my iPhone, and uploaded to the server. No need work on my Mac, since the photos are already on the iPhone anyway. Enjoy!