Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7, and yes, it’s as good as they said it would be.  The new interface is looks better, is more convenient, and even feels faster.  Things are somehow closer to where they should be and overall it makes more sense.  However, I am yet to test it on a few non-technical bloggers who I help with blog hosting and administration.

The upgrade itself was fast and painless as usual – just overwrite the old files with new, visit administration, and click on a button to upgrade the database structure when asked so.  That’s it.  I’ve also scrolled through the Settings section just to see what’s new (a few things are), and that’s about it.

I’ve noticed that there are a few glitches here and there, most of which are related to plugins that I am using.  Hopefully I’ll sort them out soon.  In the worst case scenario, they will be taken care of in the new design that is in the works for this blog.

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so – Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!

A new version of my favorite Linux distribution has been released recently – Fedora 8.  I got my hands on the installation DVD (thanks bro!) and tried it straight away.

It didn’t go very well – the installation was hanging up during dependencies check.  I thought maybe it was something simple to fix and checked it with strace, which showed that the installation was looping constantly creating some temporary files and then removing them.  I tried to create these files by hand, but they were immediately removed.  I asked around on #fedora IRC channel, but it was over a weekend and it was rather empty.  No tips were given.

Then I came across Michael’s post that reminded me that I could do an upgrade using Yum package manager, bypassing the installation altogether.   Following the steps in the guide was simple and soon yum started downloading the new packages.  But my Internet connection is pretty slow, it would have taken me about two days just to get the files.   Not much fun to wait.  Instead I decided to copy files from the DVD to /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/ directory and restart the upgrade process.  Now all I needed to download were the updates that were released since the distribution went public.

A couple of hours later I rebooted into Fedora 8, running the new tick-less kernel (the biggest reason for me to upgrade).  I also noticed that a few fonts packages were updated – fonts are sharper and cleaner.  NetworkManager was upgraded.  And a few other things improved.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about sound problems due to a new sound server, but I didn’t have a chance to test it yet.  Other than this though everything seems to be running just fine.

Finally, my prayers have been heard and my Gmail account was upgraded to the newer version.  It is as sweet as was promised.  Message pre-loading makes sorting through mail in morning extremely fast.  New contact manager is indeed much better than the old, dare I say, address book.   It still misses a few things, like fields for URLs.

Now I’m waiting for all those Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts that I use to beautify and customize Gmail to get updated and work with the new version.

I am planning to bring the server down today for a few minutes. The reason for the downtime is the upgrade of the system. The machine is almost out of disk space and its hard disks urgently need replacement.

It’s been a while since I ugpraded hard disks and therefor it runs on a bunch of really outdated disks like 40 and 60 GBytes. I will pass by the computer shop today to see what’s the current situation with hardware and if the prices are good I am planning to get at least a 200 GByte disk. Maybe even a 300 GByte disk. Or maybe even a couple of 200 GByte ones.

This upgrade should also free up some space in the server’s case. At this moment there are five IDE devices installed in the room designed to hold only three of them.

Update: I’ve just purchased Seagate Barracuda 200 GByte hard disk in ComputerLand Center for a mere 68 CYP. It will be installed shortly.

Update: The old 40 GByte hard disk that was hosting root filesystem has been replaced by the new 200 GByte disk. Some hard disk tetris is yet to be played though. I still have to free up some space in the case and disconnect some old junky hardware. But all this will be done later. I am tired of the noise and dust at the moment.

I’ve been very lazy with site changes these days. It’s been almost a month since Wordpress 1.5.2 was released. I have updated the site only today. There shouldn’t be any visible changes as most of the improvements are under the hood. If you see any problems with the new version – let me know.

Something just have to be there. Like good ventilation in computer case. Otherwise it is very easy to run into problems.

I have mentioned previously that my computer case was missing a fan or two and that caused it to overheat several times a day. Well, today it did it for the last time. I suspect that the IDE controller on the motherboard got burned.

So, instead of buying a couple of fans I had to buy a new motherboard now. But buying just the motherboard is way too boring. I had to get at least the CPU as well. But I didn’t do even that. Instead I bought the whole new computer. Actually, it’s not brand new. It is second hand. But it is a brand one – IBM. It is very similar to the one I have in the office.

So, now you can enjoy this site running on a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU with 1 GByte of RAM. I’ve moved in all the hard drives from the old computer, but I think I will be upgrading my disk space soon too. Fitting five IDE devices into a medium tower case was rather tricky. And they make too much noise too. I didn’t hear much of it with the old machine because it was very noise itself. The new one is totally silent. The loudest sound it makes is me banging on the keyboard. It is impossible to say if the computer is on or off by only listening to noise it makes.

Anyway, I think I got a good deal for 240 CYP.

They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.

Slashdot has a story. And a dup.

I have finally upgraded to this blog to Wordpress 1.5.1.3. A couple of security issues with XML RPC are fixed by this release. I was a bit slow, since the fixes were released for over a week now, but not to worry – my PHP installation already had all the fixes for XML RPC installed.

Slashdot is running a story on the issue. One of the comments shows an easy way of upgrading PEAR that not everyone might be familiar with:

pear clear-cache
pear upgrade XML_RPC

As you all had probably noticed the server was down for a looong time – about 18 hours. It all started as minor hardware upgrade, that didn’t went right, that was turned into major software upgrade. The server is currently running Fedora Linux Core 4. Not everything is fixed and reconfigured, so, please stay with me for the time being. I am trying to fix everything as fast as I can. Yes, that includes your hosted websites.

I will let you know when I’m done so that you could check if everything is back to normal. I will also provide some more details about what went wrong and how I worked around it.

So long for now…