A whois shows me that Intrawest has the DNS servers on the same class C block of IP addresses, this is bad. When the internet goes down on the intrawest subnet all of steamboat.com goes down because they have no backup name server on a separate internet connection.

DNS2.INTRAWEST.COM 208.181.214.65
DNS1.INTRAWEST.COM 208.181.214.66

Sending “pings” to the DNS IP’s just times out.

— 208.181.214.65 ping statistics —
76 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 75057ms

Shame on steamboat.com’s DNS administrator. This is basic internet101stuff and could be repaired in just a few minutes if anybody over at steamboat.com had a clue. If you are reading this and you are from steamboat.com, please fix this so I can scrape the snow report successfully once again. If you need help send me@phrog.org some email and ski vouchers and I would be happy to help fix this properly.

The snow report comes from steamboat.com which offers up an XML feed of the report, however it has been broken for years because it has no “style” associated with it, making it useless for anyone with a normal RSS reader to subscribe. So I made up a cron job to scrape the snow page on steamboat.com and dump it to a php for including here. If you would like to use the no frills raw scrape of the report for viewing on your phone or whatever just point it to http://phrog.org/snow.php and stay updated. I promise you your browser will not complain about plugins your missing, and it wont crash because of some fancy web designers effect is overpowering your device. Just the snow report.

Getting the Weather was much simpler. NOAA kicks ass when it comes to sharing info and the Weathericon plugin uses the information from noaa.gov to fill in the weather info I want into the sidebar, its simple and I recommend it to anyone who would like weather in their wordpress.

I was quite pleased with myself yesterday when I woke up all hung over and stumbled downstairs to my computer and saw the mountain had 5 inches at 5am. When I got on the mountain at 8am it was at 11 inches. My official first powder day of this season.

install required stuff
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 phpmyadmin mysql-server
Go to http://localhost to see if “It Works!” if so then apache2 is running.
Then try http://localhost/phpmyadmin if it loads then ya have php5 working with apache2! requirements done. Let’s move on

make your web folders
mkdir ~/www
mkdir ~/www/ampache
cd ~/www/ampache/

get subversion
sudo apt-get install subversion

get ampache
svn checkout https://svn.ampache.org/trunk

set up a virtual host
jed /etc/apache2/sites-available/ampache

create a virtualhost similar to this and save



ServerAdmin webmaster@ladybug
DocumentRoot /home/eek/www/ampache/svn.ampache.org/trunk
Options Indexes
ServerName ladybug
ErrorLog /home/eek/www/ampache/svn.ampache.org/ampache-error_log
CustomLog /home/eek/www/ampache/svn.ampache.org/ampache-access_log common


restart apache
apache2ctl restart

edit your /etc/hosts to include “ladybug”
echo "127.0.0.1 ladybug" >> /etc/hosts

goto http://ladybug in your browser if you get an ampache install screen..
You will need to have created a mysql user and database with http://your-ip/phpmyadmin