Category: Site Related

On Thursday after the choir concert I started losing my voice, so I stopped talking in an effort to not lose it completely. It worked, and was maybe even a bit fun. I still prefer talking in  the long run though. I also noticed something interesting that happened: I could hear better. I’m not sure if it was just because I wasn’t talking so it was quieter, but it seemed I could hear everything more sharply.  In somewhat related news, I’ve noticed that sometimes when there’s something artistically beautiful or significant, a single tear will roll out of my left eye. It’s weird, yeah, but maybe it has something to do with the creative right side of the brain controlling the left side of the body.

I’ve reinstalled Debian, I felt there was a buildup of bloat on my previous system. While I did this, I moved the site over temporarily to one of my BOINC zombies. I resized my initial partition into the smallest size possible near the end of my drive. I resized the swap partition from an extravagant 3.8GB to a more logical 2GB. I made the rest of the drive another ext3 partition. During all the pre-reinstall tweaking I did, I adjusted the BIOS. I turned off all the onboard stuff except ethernet. I noticed the SiS onboard video card was sharing 32MB of my RAM, so I disabled that. Oops, no video. I had to go get a spare video card and use that. Nothing fancy, just an ATI Radeon LT. All it needed to do was text anway.

I then installed the system, checking Basic System and Web Server as the packages to install, because it seemed to have frozen when I tried SQL server as well. I installed a few basic packages such as lynx and bzip2, copied over the server log and configuration files, and set up the static LAN IP. After making sure the password protection for some server resources were intact, (they were) I pointed the router at the server again. It seems faster, which is everything I was looking for.

This is an interesting video. It compares Bush’s speaking skills 10 years ago to a more recent Bush. Link.

I took down the forum. It was dead and just being used by link spam bots. I still have the MySQL, I’ll back that up in case resurrecting it ever becomes an attractive option.

Never install a tool unless you’re certain what it will do. I just installed ez-ipupdate, and set it to look on eth0. I was trying to set it up so I wouldn’t have to call my Mom (when at Dad’s) or check ipchicken every time my IP changed, and just have my server update the DNS automatically. Unfortunately, the tool obediently checked the IP on eth0, and found it to be 192.168.1.100, the LAN IP of the server, which was different than what was listed. It changed it immediately. I had a hunch right after I hit OK that it might do that. Sure enough, the records flashed from the correct IP to that of 192.168.1.100, the LAN IP. I tried checking some DNS lookups, hoping that some delay in DNS updates would give me correct IP. It didn’t, and I turned to other sources. Mom didn’t answer the phone, so I tried checking my bash history. Luckily, I still had an ssh command logged with the numeric IP from when I was checking the IP earlier. I manually changed it back, and hastily uninstalled ez-ipupdate. Whew.