System Information

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.

Today, I dropped an Athlon 2400 (that I pulled out of the PVR, replacing it with an Athlon 3000) into the webserver to replace the Athlon 2000 CPU that had been in there. I wonder if you’ll notice any difference in speed or responsiveness on the site, though I doubt it!

Tonight, I performed a comprehensive system backup of the site using Mondo, an excellent freeware backup solution. It was unavailable for about 45 minutes while the backup was tested.

I noticed recently that FEDORA CORE 5 has been released. We’ve been running FEDORA CORE as the Linux-based operating system of this webserver for many years. I am looking forward to upgrading to FEDORA CORE 5, but it took some time to download and burn the 3 gigabyte DVD. I then had to verify the burn (which was fine), which also took some time.

Then, I launched the webserver from the DVD and answered a few questions. It then seemed to hang at the “Retrieving System Information” prompt… I waited about 7 minutes before giving up and rebooting back into FEDORA CORE 4. I just don’t have time to worry about it now, and it’s running well as it is. Once my show is over, I’ll work on upgrading.

This evening, I upgraded from version 1.5.2 to version 2.0 of the software running this site, WordPress. WordPress is a state-of-the-art symantic personal publishing platform that is extremely lean, well-crafted, and very extendible with plugins.

The upgrade went very smoothly, however, if you spot anything strange, please let me know so I can fix it.

Congratulations to Matt and the development team for releasing 2.0.

LONG LIVE WORDPRESS!