forgot to renew my domain registration. they sent emails but i kept putting it off thinking i'd do it after the trip. i didn't realize that it expired yesterday. oh well. i just paid for 5 years so it should be fine for a while.
i'm going to post this for google's benefit. if anyone is looking for a good php 5 web host check out telana.com. they've got their shit together. mysql and ssh are included in the base price. they keep all the software up to date. there's a good selection of pear modules.
the support is amazing, i just sent off an email (at 2am) asking how to hide .svn directories on the website and got a response 10 minutes later saying it was fixed.
as you may have noticed i've been tweaking the style sheet for the site. there were several things that had annoyed me for a while and i finally got around to fixing them. along the way, i found a color wheel tool that made picking colors much easier.
i've gotten most of the work done on the server. it's a hell of a lot faster now. i'll probably put up more photos now that i don't have to sit around waiting for them to resize.
update: okay, that was obviously a lie. this turned into a massive cluster fuck when i tried to upgrade freebsd to 5.3. it turned out that they'd broken vinum, the software i used for mirroring the harddrives. i decided to just get an adaptec ata raid card but the freebsd docs didn't really explain how to use it so i managed to corrupt the drives.
i had just about every thing backed up but some of the web galleries got screwed up. the photos are there but the meta data is missing. i think the mail setup is still a bit wanky.
had some drama updating the php4 port over the last few days. php was hosing apache causing it to keep forking off copies until all the cpu was used up making it very difficult to restart the webserver. once i figured out that they'd updated the port it was a matter of walking through the bits of config wierdness.
just in case anyone googles across this i'll mention that you have to modify the php.ini from "extension_dir = ./" to "extension_dir = /usr/local/lib/php/20020429/". i think i'll send off an email to the port maintainer.
i'm down in reno this week, supposedly to fix the house up to sell but i've spent an assload of time trying to upgrade my server. i replaced the harddrives doubling the diskspace and upgraded to freebsd 5.2.1 which turned into something of a head ache. at this point it's almost all done. just need to do a little juggling of data to get the software raid-1 working right. the short of it is if you've wondered what was wrong with my website that's what.
i've finally gotten around to updating the templates on the website. i'd been rocking the table based layout for at least two years. when i noticed that esr had reworked his site to use css it was clearly time to act.
i've still got to finish up some of the conversion but within the next couple of days most stuff should be XHTML strict + CSS.
spent a good part of the day trying to get the server working again. it had crashed in the middle of a operating system upgrade. i'm assuming it was due to lightning (i wouldn't be suppressed if the ups at the office is bad). what was really annoying was that it'd been almost 80 days since the last reboot. anyway, i think every thing is back to normal.
i've been playing around trying to integrate the photo gallery into the rest of the website. now you should see a random photo and list of the galleries. it took me forever to figure out how to do those small bits but the good news is that now i'm pretty comfortable hacking gallery. look for more changes in the next month or so.
i'm going to be finishing upgrading the server to the new version of freebsd tomorrow so if the server is down for a bit that's why. i don't anticipate any trouble though.
looks like my php went down. not sure why, maybe the gallery got slammed. i'm looking into it. update: fixed it.
the office my server resides in got moved today so it was offline for a little while this morning. everything is back up and any delayed mail should show up soon.
i've installed the new version of moveable type. i'm really stoked about it.
i've also upgraded imp/horde, the web-based email client and the ssl certificate. steve had posted that he wasn't able to get to his mail. if anyone is having problems getting their mail post a comment here.
dan's got a new look for his webpage. i moved him from blogger to moveabletype. charlie's finally gotten himself a new webpage as has krista.
i got mod_php fixed so the gallery is back up again. posted some new zoobomb photos from last month when joe lane was in town. i'll be putting some other portland pictures in the next few days.
i guess reno was racked by windstorms over the weekend. it killed the power at the office where my server lives. the downtime outlasted the ups and when the power came back on mine didn't reboot itself. anyway, everything should be right as rain now.
i've gotten the blog moved over to moveable type and it's working pretty well. i'm still trying to get the archives and some other stuff setup the way i want it.
i went back and added all the old bike trip emails. both 2000 rno-slc and the 2001 transam are now in the blog. i'm going to get category index pages setup so that it's easier to find the entries.
i'd been trying to get movable type up working as a blogger replacement for a while and it's finally about ready to go live. i'm trying to minimize the broken links that will occur during the transition by replicating the archive format that blogger produced. mt will let me do a bunch of cool stuff and make older trip related posts a lot more accessible.
i've been looking for a better way to make my photos web accessible for a while. originally i wrote a php site to do it but it was linked to a microsoft sql server so when i moved to freebsd it no longer worked. a couple of days ago i came across gallery and it fits almost all of my needs. playing around with it i put up all my pictures from my first trip to asia, the trip to spain and the bike trip. feel free to check them out. i'll be slowly moving pictures into it, i think the ones from spain are next. keep an eye out.
okay so the box that my server runs on got moved to a new location and the ip address chaged. i got it updated but it might take a little time for everyone to pick up the changes.
i also got some pictures up so scroll down and look at them.
turns out that the mail server wasn't starting up correctly after the reboot. got the startup scripts fixed though so it should be okay in the future. bottom line is that mail was bouncing until about 11:00 yesterday.
multivac (my server) took a couple of days off over the weekend. my friend hee was able to get it straightened out for me. i wasn't looking forward to driving back to reno to do it myself. i think my mail was bouncing so if you sent me anything on friday or saturday i probably didn't get it.
i decided to waste a couple of hours trying to get a new webmail system running on mail.drewish.com this afternoon. i used horde's imp system and i've got to say it's pretty cool. it's got support for folders, spell checking and an address book. i'm pretty stoked.
the dsl to my house has been down for a week now. nevada bell screwed up their billing and cut off the line, they're supposed to get it up by saturday.
the dsl at my house was down on thursday and friday, i ended up moving my server in to work so i could get my mail. the connect to my house is back up but i haven't moved the server back yet.
the links to comics were taking up too much space so i moved them to the bottom and used img links instead of the text ones i had been using.
i've gotten a ton of stuff working in the last two days, unfortunately none of it is paying.
all the files on my freebsd box are now mirrored with vinum, it was kind of a project but it's good to know that the odds of a repeat of this summer's hard drive crash are greatly reduced.
as a project to learn python i wrote a program to create the karnaugh maps we've been using in my cs236 class. i'm really impressed by how easy it is to write simple but powerful programs in python, i'll probably start using it a lot more now that i've got a handle on it.
bob and i went to alberson's tonight to buy beers and ran into the spaceman and his dutch ladyfriend. hopefully i'll get to hang out with them before she leaves.
server status update: the ethernet switch at my house went out for most of the day today, taking down katherinehouse.com and the mail.drewish.com. i've put an old 10mbs hub in it's place and tomorrow i'll be trying to get the switch warranteed.
i upgraded my server to freebsd 4.5 tonight, it had been up for 48 days with out a reboot. i never had that kind of uptime with windows, crap they can't go that long between security updates.
is beer really responsible for civilization?
i'm a bit disturbed by how many plans i've had for what to do this summer. first the round the world trip (probably won't have enough money) then the bike trip across australia (again money) now teaching english in china sounds very good. big benefit is that i only need to have travel costs. once i'm over there it pays well and it's super cheap. i guess only time will tell what i'll be doing.
okay the mail seems to be working again, i don't know if i missed anything but it probably wasn't that important.
it's got to be hard to be a brewer in salt lake city.
i guess i'd messed up the dns record of my mail server, oops well hopefully i'll start getting mail again.
i spend the entire day playing unix. i just wanted to get the newer version of postgresql working so i updated my /usr/ports directory. after that i spend hours recompiling to newer versions. got apache 1.3.22, php 4.0.6 (with imap but sadly no gd) and finally postgresql 7.1.3. it was a pretty productive day in terms of learning stuff but i don't really feel like i got much done.
instead of working today i got apache, php, and postresql working on my home server. learned alot about the ports collection on freebsd. take my word for it, it's your friend. the short of this (as opposed to the long) is that i can finally start porting all my old web apps.
well i didn't post much after that because my website went down in late june. oh well it sucked but machine is back up with freebsd instead of windows 2000 and it's pretty cool. the only thing that i really miss in windows is microsoft sql server, mysql sucks dick.