As I perform user migrations, it occurs to me just how nice it would be to have a seperate /home partition. This is possible, and it’s even an explicit option in the Debian installer. That would help not only with migrations from box to box but also changing servers on networks with a home directory on NFS.
My sister now has the old server as her desktop machine, and her old machine is now a BOINC zombie.
This server is now running lighttpd. I’d capitalize it but its creators don’t. Most of my problems were caused by WordPress and its insistance on Apache’s .htaccess, (for fancy permalinks) as well as WP Super Cache. The workarounds that are out there ended up redirecting nonexistant things to the main page, something I found unacceptable. I don’t use the directory structure style permalinks, so I didn’t end up using any of the workarounds. WP Cache works fine, although my understanding is it loads PHP to serve cached files and thus is more intensive. WP Super Cache uses rewrites to avoid PHP and directly serve its files. It was really difficult to get this all working, but it is much more snappy. There was around 6MB free RAM on the Apache 2 machine even though it had 603 MB. The new server has 503 MB (an unfortunate thing I realized just now as I looked it up) and has 115 MB free. I hope it stays that way, and that there aren’t stability problems.
I upgraded to version 1.2.2 of pfSense after I noticed syslogd was eating as much processor time as it could get. I hope that doesn’t happen again. Earlier when I tried BandwidthD, it didn’t seem to collect any data, even when I gave it the time it asked for, but I reinstalled it after the upgrade and it works fine now. It’s collecting data on the LAN interface, so I guess it’ll count in-network transfers too, or maybe within LAN stuff will just go straight through the switches? I don’t know, but I suppose it will be easy enough to find out with those handy graphs. The next step will be figuring out if I can have it monitor both the LAN and WAN sides. The upgrade process was really nice. There’s a page in the interface where you can upload the firmware upgrade from your local machine. If you enable SSH and log in, it can even pull down and verify the firmware on its own or upgrade from a file on the router itself.
The lighttpd test server is progressing nicely, after the people in #wordpress helped me with the redirect problems I was barely aware I had. A feature of WordPress is to redirect traffic that isn’t going to a defined blog URL to that URL. This meant that going to the test server on port 81 would redirect me to my main server, which got even more crazy when my pfSense DNS listings pointed me to the test machine, except on port 80 where there was no server listening. Someone in the #lighttpd channel helped separate PHP launching from lighttpd, which I’m not sure is something I want to stick with. If I do, I think I’ll have to add an init.d script for it.
I am amazed by how much it helps to have a pad of paper next to me while reading Great Expectations for Brit Lit.
Happy birthday, Justice!
The World of Goo Linux version is released! The deb is for i386, but the tar.gz works fine for me. I probably have some 32-bit libraries installed for Wine or something. The music seemed slowed down on one level, but that could be a problem on my end.
No more wireless! I finally managed to crimp an end on the cable that we pulled up through a crack in the floorboards inside the wall of a closet. My hands were shaking because I was too lazy to eat enough today and I had Pepsi, which had caffine. I think I’ll stay away from Pepsi now. The baseboard had been taken off from earlier. I’m now connected at gigabit speeds, although from what I’ve read (in the rant linked to below) when I’m running Windows I won’t be able to saturate that link. 🙁 Everything seems faster now. ‘Tis awesome. ^^
They’re at it again. This time, there’s a way to slip under the net, though. Comcast reduces your packet priority if you exceed 70% of your up or down pipe for more than 15 minutes. I think my up pipe is about 52 KB/s, but just to be safe I set my BitTorrent upload limit to 33 KB/s, less than 70% of that, and 0.6 KB/s less than 70% of the slowest upload pipe listed on their website. I’m glad that they now have concrete policies, and I’m happy that they’re no longer messing with BitTorrent directly, but I’m disappointed because I don’t see a meter anywhere so I can know how close I am to the dreaded 250 GB/month quota. I have no clue how much bandwidth I use.
I found this awesome rant on Microsoft’s almost criminal business practices and the buggy, bloated thing they call an operating system. There are some pretty ugly coding practices in there.
Dad found an old floppy of Slay the Mighty Dragon. It’s a text-based adventure game he and I coded in BASIC when I was little. I’ve made the game and a BASIC interpreter available for download here. I would suggest DOSBox to run it. It’ll work in XP, but the sound or a text setting in the ending might not work correctly. If you don’t want to use DOSBox, decompress somewhere, double-click on prog.com and skip down a paragraph.
To start with DOSBox, download, install, and run it. Decompress the zip somewhere, the root of a drive would probably be easiest, or somewhere with short folder names without spaces. Apparently DOS, and DOSBox by extension, has trouble handling spaces or names longer than eight characters. I’ll assume you’ve decompressed it to C:\mightydragon. In the DOSBox prompt, enter mount c: c:\mightydragon, then c:. You should now be at a C:\> prompt. To start the BASIC interpreter, enter prog.com.
You should now be in the BASIC interpreter. Press F3 or type LOAD”, then game.bas. Press F2 to run it. If you’re running with plain ol’ XP DOS emulation, the sounds will probably try to use the PC Speaker on your motherboard, which may or may not work. If you’re using DOSBox, the sound will use your speakers. If you finish the game you’ll probably just have to close the window. I can’t figure out how to exit the BASIC interpreter. Have fun!
The timing for the snow day was awesome. I was glad for the break. Four-day weekend! ^^
I played Left 4 Dead Versus and got ground into a fine powder. However, I knew it was a game, didn’t ragequit, and asked for advice when we finished and went back to the lobby:
I’m halfheartedly working on Chemistry studying. I hope Monday will prove to be productive.