A changelog by Daniel Mettler

While trying to process my to-do list (lower prio things will have to wait, as usual) I just noticed that Andres and Pascal have blogs too for quite a while.

Regarding my own blog, I still need to finalize the migration to wp. As you guessed, there are lots of higher priority tasks that need to be done first. Of course I’d also have lots of interesting things to blog about. Let’s see whether I can again share some of the findings and experiences with you from time to time..

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 ;)