software upgrades

Scheduled downtime

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It’s been a while since I ugpraded hard disks and therefor it runs on a bunch of really outdated disks like 40 and 60 GBytes.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Update: The old 40 GByte hard disk that was hosting root filesystem has been replaced by the new 200 GByte disk.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.

Bumped it up to 1.5.2

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.

It couldn’t last forever

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.

12 minutes

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.

Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3

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