Miscellaneous Knowledge

A while ago, I picked up a ST4120P, a Fujitsu Tablet PC.  It’s quite dated, having a blazing fast 933Mhz Pentium 3 Mobile Processor, a maximum of 512MB RAM, integrated 802.11b wireless and so on. However, it’s still a tablet and works fine for writing notes in programs such as OneNote (or Paint, for those that can’t afford office!).

I upgraded the drive to a 120GB Segate drive, which is quieter, uses less power and has 6x the capacity of the previous one. In other words, this tablet is all ready to go.

Or not. I encountered a small problem where the screen would work perfectly in landscape mode, but if you switched to portrait, the pen would be 90 degrees out of sync. This is odd, having installed all the drivers correctly. Google wasn’t much help – one other user reported this problem and solved it by installing from SP0, and removing certain parts of the SP2 install – not something I was prepared to do. I went back to Fujitsu’s driver site and found one driver I had overlooked, the “Pen User Mode” components. I downloaded and installed these and portrait now worked perfectly. Excellent, this tablet, which cost me around£150 total after upgrades, is now ready to go. Perhaps the best bit of it is the battery life – an amazing 6hr 30min even though it’s 5 years old – this is a real world test with the tablet idle, but screen on full brightness. The only downside is that a full charge takes 24hr, but otherwise a perfect, affordable tablet.

As things tend to disappear from Fujitsu’s site, you can download the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120P Pen User Mode Components from us. Use at your own risk of course, works for me, unlikely to break your system but in this cover-your-ass world I have to have some disclaimer just in case something goes awry and I get the blame…

Around mid december, I noticed that traffic for my Left 4 Dead Servers page dropped sharply – from 100 unique visitors a day to 5, at most.

Traffic Graph for www.l4dservers.net

Most of my traffic comes from search engine referrals, so to have a drop off like this must have something to do it Google.

Cue Google’s Webmaster Tools, a handly place for you to view all statistics about your site. On their diagnostics section I was getting a lot of “Network Unreachable” errors on the robots.txt. Basically, Google couldn’t access my site to read the robots.txt – nothing wrong with the actual robots.txt at all, it was a web server problem. After having a look around, I came across some information on diagnosing the issue, no help from Google itself on this matter of course. The information listed here indicated that certain software was blocking google for making too many requests the to the server, in a DoS attack fashion. This site is hosted on reseller hosting, however it shares the machine with a lot of other websites. In which case, Google has been accessing many sites on this server generating a high number of requests. Therefore, the software on the machine automatically blocked Google falsely beleiving that it was attacking sites on the machine.

This blog was also hosted on this reseller account, and traffic figures showed a similar decline. I’ve recently bought a dedicated cPanel server to replace the reseller and moved the blog onto there – bingo! This blog now appears back in search engine listings. If we look at Google’s Webmaster Tools, we can see the amount of pages crawled by it.

Google Crawl Statistics for Miscellaneous Knowledge

Right after moving it off the reseller hosting and onto the server, loads of pages are instantly and successfully crawled. The blog is back in the Google index.

www.l4dservers.net is still pending move to the new hosting, but I expect to see similar results once I have completed the move, just waiting on the DNS to be updated for it.

So what can you do if you experience this issue? First, read this excellent article and make sure that your lack of Google listing isn’t your fault. If you are not at fault, contact your hosting provider and point them to the article, ask them if they have any firewalls that block multiple requests such as the Googlebot. I would also highly suggest signing up to Google’s Webmaster Tools to help diagnose any problems Google has accessing your site. While they where not particually helpful in this incident, it did help to get me started on the diagnosis. Not only this, but it allows you to submit sitemaps which vastly improve your ranking and help make sure that every page is in Google’s index. Sitemaps are checked very often and any new URLs are quickly crawled helping you get any content into Google quickly.

From the more technical side, this article might be of interest. It details how ConfigServer Firewall might be a culprit in this.