Category: numlock.ch

I’ve finally managed to migrate this server from the Via Eden barebone to the new, powerful Dual-Xeon EMT64 server :) Now it runs as a Gentoo Xen domU guest on a Gentoo dom0 host with LVM2 (If in doubt, use LVM2 instead of a flat file for performance reasons). It’s neither fully operational nor fully optimized yet (I will do another migration in the background), but it does its duty for now.

Finally I’ve ordered a new server to replace the not-so-reliable barebone Mini-ITX server that runs this site. Initially, I actually wanted to build the server all by myself, assembling the best SME server components I can get. As it turned out, I would have had to import most of the components from different suppliers, making do-it-yourself assembling a very time consuming and risky (ad)venture. I thus decided to order a nice (but not cutting edge), hopefully well-tested, pre-built server from Dell.

It’s a customized variant of the Dell PowerEdge 1800 with the following specs:

• 2 x Intel Xeon Irwindale 3 GHz with EMT64 (the Intel analogon of AMD64), HTT and XD/NX-bit support, 800 MHz FSB [ UPDATE: Dell upgraded the two Xeons to 3.2 GHz for free! Thanks! :) ]
• 2 x 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
• SATA RAID Controller PCI Card (seems to be an Adaptec RAID controller)
• 2 x 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disks for HW RAID 1
• Remote Management PCI Card

All that for about 3.2k CHF which is a reasonable price (not counting a 500 GB SATA II HDD for incremental backups I will buy elsewhere as Dell has only 250 GB HDDs).

If I would have assembled a server myself, I had probably chosen AMD Opteron CPUs, an ASUS K8N-LR motherboard, a 3ware 9550SX SATA II RAID controller and two fast 500 GB SATA II HDDs. But it’s very difficult to get these components in Switzerland, not to mention getting them from a single supplier. Further there’s the risk that the components don’t harmonize once they have been assembled.

The server will arrive on April 21 and I expect that migration will take at least another 1 to 2 weeks (as I need to recompile Gentoo and adjust the settings for the new environment).

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve finally managed to migrate the posts and comments to the new publishing software (which is WordPress, mainly due to the fact that it can be conveniently kept current using Gentoo’s portage system). The outgoing links/blogroll is still not migrated though (as I don’t have them ready in an OPML file for easy importing) – it will be done ASAP.

Note that links of RSS/XML/Atom feeds and of the blog itself are not necessarily final yet (expect some changes during the next couple of weeks)

Stay tuned and thanks for your patience!

Dani

P.S. If you’re wondering: The design of the blog will be migrated too, of course ;)

I’ve now enabled a basic captcha system provided by a Movabletype plugin called SCode. In order to make it work I had to do a couple of things that are not mentioned in the official installation instructions:

1. make the mt-scode.cgi CGI script executable:

# chmod a+x mt-scode.cgi

2. make sure that SCode is enabled and configured both on a MT global level and on a per-weblog basis
3. Correct a bug in SCode.pl:

replace security code you see here\” src=\”$path/plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi by security code you see here\” src=\”$path”.”plugins/SCode/mt-scode.cgi

#3 is not essential, but a bug nonetheless.

Hopefully, the comment spam problem is now solved for a while by enabling this plugin. Trackback spamming is still possible, though.

Please contact me if you are visually impaired and would like to post a comment on this blog. Ideally, the captcha image should also be available as a sound file/stream, but I haven’t found the time yet to implement sth like this.

I finally upgraded MT 3.1.x to MT 3.2. The upgrade process was much easier than expected. The only error I encountered was sth like:

main([path to install]/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

which could be solved by simply rebuilding the whole site, as explained in

“failed To Open Stram” When Clicking On Comments” href=”http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t53967.html”>Movable Type Community Forum > “failed To Open Stram” When Clicking On Comments

The new features of MT 3.2 are very welcome of course.

There’s no more standalone_style.css in the most recent version of Gallery v1, as the names of the CSS stylesheets were changed, unnecessarily breaking existing systems in productive use. A good example of bad release engineering (note that Gallery v1 is supposed to be a stable version).

There are new SSL/TLs certificates for numlock.ch, valid through July 23, 2015:

SSL/TLS server certificates

Please delete the old certificates and import the new ones. Thank you.

For those who are interested in how to create TLS/SSL certificates for Gentoo, take a look at the Virtual Mailhosting System with Postfix Guide. In order to extend the validity of the certificates to 10 years, you need to edit a couple of files:

in /usr/sbin/mkimapdcert, replace

/usr/bin/openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes \

with

/usr/bin/openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -nodes \

in /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf, set

default_days = 3650 # how long to certify for

(note that strangely, the default settings in /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf override the custom settings in /etc/ssl/misc/CA.pl)

Due for a long time (apologies!), now I finally switched to full content feeds for your convenience.

RSS 2.0 full content feed
Atom 0.3 full content feed

Please adjust your subscription, if necessary. Migration to wordpress will probably follow sooner or later (yet another item on my to do list).

do follow: enable nofollow :)