Category: ChitChat

Ouch… 101 hours of no internet access!

I still haven’t received an acceptable explanation from my ISP, some upgrades occurred on Thursday with their provider and something failed… No backout plan, no spare hardware, no internet for several thousand Victorian users!

And of course, the upgrade was occuring the day before the Australian Day long weekend, so nobody was going to give up their holidays to fix it (strange though, I was on-call over both the Xmax & New Year weekends!)

Well I’ve done it!

I’ve rebuilt my main linux box… it’s now a XEN server, and the webserver is now running in it’s own virtual domain. This will prevent me from breaking things when I perform updates (in theory anyway!).

For the last 26 days this site has been running from a virtual machine on my Windows 2003 server. I’ve had all sorts of problems during this time, slow responses, time drift issues, etc.

Bored… bored… bored…

Let’s try adding some new features!!!!

New feature… avatars! Currently there’s only a choice of avatars that came with the plugin… looks like they’re randomly assigned to begin with, and frequent commenters get to select their own! The avatar plugin is designed to work with comments, but can be added to a post like this :-

Updated feature… polls!
I’ve found a different polling plugin, that allows polls to be added within a post… the old polls aren’t compatible, so all of those hard earnt results are gone 😛

Other features… just a couple to help me manage backups, timezones, etc…

Cheers!

I did it again, I broke the blog by doing a Debian security update! All of this a few hours after finding and fixing the problem that SIVART was experiencing!

I don’t know exactly what broke the blog, I’ve tried every suggestion I could find at the WordPress about blank blog pages.

My solution… A brand new Virtual server running a cutdown version of Debian 3.1 (Stable)!

I restored the blog to this new server, however the blank blog page bug also manifested on this server.

I decided to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and my blog is back! (And yes I tried this same step on the old server, with no improvement)

The next problem was how to let the real world see this new server, my ISP only provides me with a single IP address, and I’m still hosting other sites on my old server.
Simple solution, I modified the virtual webhost on the original server to now act as a reverse proxy to the new server.

So it’s all up and running… total outage a little bit over 12 hours! I did manage to get about 6 hours of sleep somewhere in there!

This isn’t the best solution, but it works for now… I’ll review and redesign the setup when I have a spare moment! 😉

Not sure how many people noticed, but this site has been unavailable for a couple of days.

I had been neglecting the maintenance of my Linux server for a couple of months, and accidenly screwed the entire server while trying to catch up… I accidently selected too many additional packages, and while attempting to unselect them I somehow managed to uninstall some major packages (apache, mysql, sshd just to name a few).

I’ve recenly been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea, so I’m blaming this mistake on my lack of sleep and short attention span…

Now what was I talking about again?