The Grand Downtime

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…

Migrated to WordPress

I have finally managed to migrated to WordPress. Database statistics inform me that:

There are currently 1,884 posts and 479 comments, contained within 22 categories.

As of now I am still fixing minor glitches here and there, but major things work. Just to let you know what is broken:

  • Permanent links. They are not working yet at all. Fixed.
  • Old links. None of the old links are working. Partially fixed. All of them won’t work anyway. Let me know if you find anything that I missed.
  • Users. I haven’t created any except for amdin account and myself. Feel free to register though. Not a bug. My brother managed to register all by himself, thus there is no problem.
  • Thumbnails. Some pictures come out in their original size and thus really mess up the look and feel. I will attend to this problem shortly. Too much editing required. Only new posts will have proper thumbnailing. And those that I will fix manually. Please complain.
  • Google Ads. I don’t yet have it installed. I will fix the temlate very soon. Fixed. Google Ads will now appear only on full item pages. This should improve the click-through ratio due to better ad suggestions. Keep clicking.
  • Blogroll. WordPress has an excellent tool for maintaining a blogroll, but it is not very useful to me, since I have mine at BlogLines. I’ll fix the exporting script shotly. Fixed.

If you are subscribed to the RSS feed, please change the address of feed in your preferences to this RSS feed.

plugout resintalled

Finally I pushed myself to reinstall the plugout machine, which is responsible for entertainment in my living room. Amasingly fast installation and configuration of Red Hat Linux 9 and I have mp3s, DivX, and DVD playback with TV-out option in less then an hour. I can feel the experience. :)

Hardware rearrangements

Real fun day! :) After I woke up, I’ve continued with assembling of the new PC. When I was almost done, Olga came in and suggested that my home network planning and planning of hosts locations was totally wrong. After a bit of thinking I was convinced and started to redo the whole thing. Everything was going fine, until I decided to test it. :) Somehow it happened that I put 230 volts into the power supply while it was switched to operate in 110 volts mode. No surprise the damn thing exploded with a terrible sound, which caused me and Olga to go partially deaf for the rest of the day. Here goes 520 watts.

So, I call up Lev and ask him to come over, so that he could prevent me from doing lots of other stupid things. He kindly agreed, I brought him over and we started playing with the rest of the hardware. My high-tower case was now filled with 4 hard disks, CD-ROM drive, CD writer, Intel Celeron 2GHz processor and 256 megs of RAM. Surprisingly, the whole thing started to work using an old 235 watts power supply. I was extrememly glad until I started noticing lots of strange behavoir. First of all, machine state was totally different with every reboot – even /bin/hostname returned different results. Then things started to go completely insane and I’ve almost lost my mind. Imagine seeing different results from two consequtive runs of /bin/ls! /bin/df was no different.

After doing few things here and there, I found out that it’s time to restore the system from the proper copy of it on another hard disk that I had. Yet again a surprise – files were restored, but all of them were owned by root.root . Excellent! :) This was where I said – enough for today and went to the office. :)

Shopping for hardware

Since I’ve decided to replace my wireless video extension burned yesterday with a proper PC setup for playing DVDs, divx, and mp3s, I needed to do some shopping. The goal is to get something simple and good enough for my entertainment needs.

Quick shop inspection left me with Shuttle AB48N motherboard, Intel Celeron 2.0GHz CPU, a stick of 256MB DDR-333MHz RAM, and Prosource PS-520DF power supply (520 watts, since it’ll have to support a lot of hard disks in the same machine). I’ve paid a bit less then 200CYP (about 350USD).

Now I will have to push myself to actually assemble the whole thing.