Finally! Since being without power at my datacenter (actually, my computer room (actually, my spare bedroom)) since Sunday, September 14, the power finally came back on last night around 1:00am. Trying to get things back to normal around here…

The webserver is back (obviously), the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is back, and my Network Accessible Storage (NAS) stack … needs some attention. It booted but all the drives (over 1 terrabyte) are not back online yet. That may be part of the NAS’s internal boot-up verification process, or it might be a problem. Will diagnose — and fix — this evening when I am back in Cincinnati (I am currently in Lexington Kentucky).

UPDATE: The NAS stack is back up and running. Doing final configuration checks to ensure that it’s re-integrated into the server network, but it’s looking promising.

Wow! That was… unexpected!

After a LONG time of not upgrading my site’s operating system, various initiatives I am undertaking required me to update from Fedora Core 5 (released March 20, 2006) to Fedora Core 9 (released May 13, 2008).

I was very nervous about this upgrade since it spanned so many versions of the operating system, but I started out with high hopes. I backed up my system to DVD using MondoArchive, an excellent bare-metal backup solution. Then, I inserted the Fedora Core 9 DVD, rebooted, and started the upgrade proceedure only to be told that one of my drives was a bit short of space (249 megs, to be exact).

The solution ended up being repartioning-in-place using a great product from Acronis which handled all the heavy lifting of the non-destructive repartition for me. I repartitioned the particular drive to a size large enough to make sure this particular problem will never surface again.

Launching the Fedora Core 9 DVD’s upgrade procedure a second time worked, using the newly-widened partition… The installer updated 890 files and rebooted successfully (I was worried about it rebooting successfully!)

However, that’s when I ran into two things… First, the webserver failed to launch because of a configuration error. Secondly, I ran into a time limit and we had to leave for dinner with friends. So, the site was down for a few hours while we enjoyed a very nice meal and evening with Brian, Milan, and Erin.

We came home, went to bed, and I was lying awake thinking of how to address the issues on the server. Next thing I knew, my feet carried me in to the server room and I started tinkering. An hour later (and about 10 minutes ago), I got the site online at last. But there is still more tweaking and testing to do… I need to ensure that the changes I made manually that got the site online will “stick” after the server is rebooted, which I will attempt to do after posting this article.

It was immediately apparent that the new operating system is considerably faster than the old one. Cold-booting takes less than 40 seconds on Fedora Core 9. I’m not sure how long it took on Fedora Core 5, but I know it was longer.

I apologize for the downtime, but it was necessary, and moving forward should be considerably smoother from now on. There is still a fair amount to do — applying non-critical patches & upgrades to the system and then another comprehensive backup, but being back online is enough for tonight.

UPDATE: Rebooting works… mostly. After rebooting, I need to enter “dhclient eth0″, “tzoupdate” and “service httpd start” to get things rolling properly. I need to determine how to automate those steps so the system reboots to an online state.

UPDATE 2: I’ve got the system configured properly now, so it boots into an online state.

Some time during the day on Wednesday, January 9, 2008, the webserver’s power supply stopped functioning and the site was unavailable.

Fortunately, I had a spare power supply at the house and was able to quickly repair the system and get us back online.

I apologize for the unexpected downtime!

Happy New Year, everyone! 2008 started quietly for Wendy & me. We attended a party at our friend Tracy’s house to ring in the new year with our closest friends. Then, for the next couple days, we laid low hanging around the house and enjoying two solid days of downtime. To give some small idea just how low we laid, we watched 5 movies… In one day!

During our downtime, I took the opportunity to upgrade this WordPress installation from version 2.2.3 to version 2.3.2. The upgrade went fairly smoothly, but there were some problems in our existing theme (Ngatini) which required me to use a different theme (Tarski). I am not sure if this is a temporary theme or if we’ll be sticking to it… Tarksi is a modern, good-looking, and well-supported WordPress theme.

I am in the process of tweaking the theme a bit to maximize its usefulness and integration into our site, so some things may not be working as expected yet. They should be fixed in the next several days.

Just a few days after I upgraded to the previous version of WordPress, the new version (2.2.0) comes out. I upgraded today, and it seems to be working well so far.

After thinking about it for far too long, this morning I spent some time upgrading my WordPress installation to 2.1.3, the most current version. I had to update a bunch of plugins to their most current version and then deactivate them one-by-one, install the new WordPress files, then re-activate (one-by-one — WordPress REALLY needs a batch plugin scheme!) them and tweak out the system. Everything seems to be working, but if you spot any weirdness, please let me know.

Using Mondo, I performed a comprehensive system backup today. The site was unavailable for about 25 minutes to verify the backup.

We’ve got a couple behind-the-scenes issues occuring with the website — our cache program isn’t working, sometimes the comment form seems to disappear, and there is an elusive bug with my permalinks. I’m working to fix all of these issues, so if you experience any system wonkiness, please bear with us!

UPDATE 1: The cache turns out to be functioning normally after all. A previous version would put TWO lines into the cached file indicating that it was served from the cache and the documentation still indicates this. However, the author has removed the second line, which is what I was looking for to determine if it was working.

UPDATE 2: It appears that the comment form issue is related to the page rendering in Internet Explorer or Firefox. The comment form works fine in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. We’re still working on this.

UPDATE 3: Thanks to Yosemite and Moshu from the WordPress Support forum (link above), we isolated the comment form problem to an out-of-date version of the HashCash plugin we’ve been running. Curiously, when I updated HashCash from 2.3 to 3.2, the comment form displayed properly in IE but not in Firefox — the opposite of what was happening before! As a result, I’ve disabled the HashCash plugin.

Still working on those permalinks! I’ve been directed to the documents that I believe will help. I just haven’t had time to work on it yet.

Thanks to my friend Rabbitt, this webserver is now at 100% functionality after the upgraded from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5. Rabbitt took some time today to fix the email system which broke during the upgrade. Emails sent to accounts on this server were not lost.

Thanks Rabbitt!

What a strange day today was! Wendy & I decided we wanted to try to see LADY IN THE WATER and even made some tentative plans with Angel to go see it. We were going to try to make the 1:40 showing, but we started to hear the sounds of …something… angry in our attic. For the past week or so, we’ve been dealing with racoons in our attic, and it sounded like one had fallen into a wall and was scrabbling to get out, so we called Mike, our pest control man, who came to the house at 3:00.

He & Wendy went into the attic and all over the house to try and rescue this little critter. After much effort, sweat, and blood, they managed to pull out of the wall a young female racoon who was, in fact, stuck. She was angry as anything, but very much alive when Mike pulled her out a couple hours after they’d started working.

During that time, I worked on upgrading this webserver from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5. With the help of a few folks (Richtroye, Zerberus, Jhutchins, Matt_T, and Plugh) from the #fedora IRC room who generously spent their time (several hours) diagnosing, testing, and suggesting changes, it finally worked. I was able to upgrade to Fedora Core 5, something I’d been trying to do since it was released in March of 2006. However, there is still work to be done. The webserver was a challenge to get functioning again (there was a cache issue that prevented pages from displaying) but it’s up. Email and a couple other things still need to be fixed, but we’re very close.

We never made it to the movie, which is just as well because Angel wasn’t feeling too well, and I needed to complete the upgrade as much as possible. Dinner was ordered in from LaRosa’s. Wendy had a deli cibatta and I had a steak hoagie. We split a salad, then it was back to the terminal for me. I finally finished up around 12:30am.