Asides

  • May 5 - Words of Wisdom

    Without getting into the whys and hows this statement came about, I find it very simple, yet poignant and applicable to many of life's situations.

    We're still learning to walk, and we're going to trip every now and then and sometimes when we run, we're going to fall on our faces. But as long as we get up, try again, and learn something from the experience, in the end, skinned knees and all, it'll be worth it.

    Thanks Sean.

    edit - might I add, I'm in a new-ish romantic relationship, which very recently hit a bump, and perhaps this analogy hit home there more than anywhere.

  • May 1 - Mac SVN Monitoring Widget

    SVN Notifiier is a handy little Mac Dashboard widget that, using Growl, will notify you when a local working copy is out of date. I've not quite gotten the "sticky" notice to work, but I just might need to edit the actual Growl settings.

    Still, it's nice to be able at a glance check your dashboard, or see a little growl notice pop up.

  • April 26 - Apple Drivers in VMware Fusion

    I think with the help of a google search and Scott Gruby", I've figured out how to use my bluetooth keyboard in VM.

    Finally, I found a reference to inserting the Leopard DVD while in Windows. I tried this and when I did, the BootCamp driver installer came up and installed my drivers. Perfect; why couldn’t VMWare say something about this on their website?

    Thanks Scott and I agree, why isn't this documented somewhere.

    Edit 8/1/08Seems you also have to disconnect the USB Bluetooth Host Controller to get it to work. Something about only one OS can control the device at a time, so the machine gets confused when the two are both connected. Disconnecting the controller, shutting down the XP install, then restarting VMware Fusion finally got it working.

Migrating Servers

April 15

What an experience this has been. I hope to write a comprehensive post at some point about the experience, but suffice to say, it's been quite the crash course on Apache, Debian, and DNS.

It all started with some curiosity, in which I purchased a Slice, and began poking around with the many tutorials they offer.  Ultimately, Owen provided me with his LAMPME script that did the basic setup for a debain, apache2, PHP 5, MySQL 5 set up, using mod_vhost (please don't quote me on any of this :-D ), which sorta got me going.  I got a bit sidetracked, and confused with setting up phpMyAdmin (I'm not that comfortable with CLI yet), and let the whole thing just sit, unused for a month or so.  However, due to the persistent problems with MediaTemple grid-servers, I vowed to stop shelling out money to them for the hassles.  If my sites go down, I want to be the one to blame, and no one else.  Besides, it's high time that I learn more about this aspect of web development.

So, armed with help from Skippy, and some new found confidence, I got everything set up so as to have a basic understanding of how/where things go, and started moving domains.  I'm just about done, with this being one of the last.  If anyone notices anything wonky, assuming I have visitors, please let me know.

Also which is quite cool so far, is that I'm going to deploy the multi-site functionality of Habari to minimize the number of actual installs I have on the server, as I run everything off of head, this means less outdated installs.  Right now I'm looking at having just 2 actual installations, with everything else running off of those.  So far it's worked out fine, though it took a little playing to get paths for things like images and files sorted out.  More on that later.  Certainly something that needs more attention, especially as silos mature.

Thanks to everyone who've helped in the process.

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3 Responses to Migrating Servers

  • It all looks good to me!

    #367 | Comment by Michael C. Harris on April 16, 2008 8:50am

  • You'll have to let us know what you think of SliceHost. I have been on Dreamhost for a while now... and it is fine. It goes down more often than I'd like, but it gets the job done and it is cheap. MediaTemple was supposed to have a good rep, so I am sorry to hear that you had troubles with them.

    #561 | Comment by Blake on May 19, 2008 8:24pm

  • Blake, so far, I'm very happy. No real issues, though having the smallest slice has produced a few warnings for excessive swap usage, which I believe is the result of some issues with logging and sessions, but I seem to have narrowed down the major culprits, and haven't received a warning in several weeks.

    For me it was a bit of a learning curve to get set up, and there's still more to learn, but between SliceHost and Google Apps (for email), I'm very satisfied, and am happily operating several low traffic sites on the 256MB slice.

    #570 | Comment by miklb on May 21, 2008 1:28am

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