Archives for Systems Administration

Moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org

 As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been planning a move from wordpress.com to my own dedicated server for a while now, not only for this blog but also for On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s book site. I said I’d write things up once I was done, so…

Step one in this process was local testing. I already had a LAMP stack running locally on the r61 so I just had to create a directory, download the latest wordpress.org tarball and untar it into that directory, then edit wp-config.php, create a database for the site to use, and walk through the automatic install. Very easy, very clean, and took about ten minutes all told. Got to hand it to wordpress there, the man-hours that have gone into streamlining and debugging the install process really shows. Once it’s installed, I went back to the wordpress.com site, exported the blog and imported that into the local wordpress.org site, downloading the images and uploads as I went. It worked almost flawlessly, let down only by timeouts as my typical Irish "broadband" proved to be more "slimband" once more. Afterwards, though, the local blog and wordpress.com blog were nearly identical. Now I could install every plugin and theme and play about with them.

Step two was registering domain names. It’s step two because wordpress will allow you to map a domain name to an existing blog, and I hoped that would ease the handover slightly. However, wordpress.com charge you per domain, so I just mapped one.

Step three was to get the dedicated server itself; the choice for me came down to either server.lu or Hetzner and in the end I chose Hetzner’s DS3000 server offer. I did try to buy Irish, but noone comes even close to the offers Hetzner and … Read the rest

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New domains!

Over the next two months or so I plan to move this blog over to a dedicated server, not because wordpress.com is bad, but because wordpress.org just offers a lot in terms of themes and widgets and things to play with (and because I want the server anyway for various programming projects, and it may pull duty hosting On Target and Wallpaper and herself’s book site as well).

Step one in this process was to install wordpress.org on a local LAMP stack on my laptop and that’s done and I’m playing about with it and maybe I’ll write something up on that later, I’m planning on writing about the entire process of switching from wordpress.com to wordpress.org anyway.

Step two was registering domain names. It’s step two because wordpress will allow you to map a domain name to an existing blog, and that eases the handover slightly. So far I’ve only mapped the one domain, but the others will all become active over the coming weeks. So in a few weeks, you can read this blog at all of the following:

Step three : Profit!

Actually, step three is to source the server, but the underpants gnomes are funnier…

 … Read the rest

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A sea of red squares…

One of the problems with running a dual boot WinXP/Linux system, apart from the fact that you rarely boot into Windows except to play games (and so you tend not to play games much – though FreeSpace2 SCP is helping there!), is that if you have a shared media folder that sees frequent creation and deletion of large files (say, for example, if you were bittorrenting cookery shows or news shows on a daily basis), the shared media folder tends to lead to a high fragmentation rate on the Windows partition (it has to be on the Windows side because while Linux can read and write NTFS with ease thanks to ntfs-3g, Windows has… issues with ext3). As in, 62% fragmented.

And then you start to realise why your dual-core 64-bit 3GHz machine with the 4Gb of RAM is stuttering while you’re trying to learn how to make pork wellington (like beef wellington but with pork tenderloin).

So you boot into Windows, flag the partition as dirty because the defragger won’t work until chkdsk runs, reboot to run chkdsk (which takes three hours to complete), then log in and fire off the defragger. A dozen times. And then, with fragmentation at 59%, decide to try a better debugger. Download the free trial of O&O and fire that off, and wait….

and wait….

and wait….

…*sigh*

That’s a whole day and all night so far, and still the damn disk isn’t happy.

I’m seriously thinking of just saying “Feck it” and erasing the Windows partition, expanding the Linux partition to take the whole disk and just using Virtualbox (which I do 95% of the time that I need anything on windows – which is literally to maintain one single diagram that hasn’t been translated from Visio to Dia/Inkspace/Xfig yet, and to … Read the rest

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New Irish Internet Tax?

The more you look at legislation in this country, the nastier an opinion you develop about it. You’d be able to forgive minor errors, small awkwardnesses, even larger problems so long as the common good was served, but the more I look at statute law in Ireland and more critically, at how it is drafted, the less charitable I feel about the drafters. Much of the stuff I see, I see through the Firearms Acts – that stuff I talk about elsewhere.

This time, though, it’s more apropos to here. The new Broadcasting Bill 2009, currently on it’s last stages in the Oireachtas and about to become the Broadcasting Act 2009, has a lovely little sting in it.

In section 140 (the definitions), it defines “television set” to mean:

any electronic apparatus capable of receiving and exhibiting television broadcasting services broadcast for general reception (whether or not its use for that purpose is dependent on the use of anything else in conjunction with it) and any software or assembly comprising such apparatus and other apparatus;

Nice little bit there. What it basicly means is that if you have no TV and you watch Youtube over your broadband connection (or download video footage and watch that), then you need to have a TV licence.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? We’ve the worst broadband rollout in the EU, in a nation where we prided ourselves on being the gateway to the EU for IT companies, where we have fancy plans for rolling out high-speed broadband to every sheep farmer in Mayo (and wireless broadband for their iPhones while they’re out with the sheep); and now we’re charging a 160 euro tax for those who opt to have broadband installed.

You wouldn’t mind if there was … Read the rest

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Goodbye Kubuntu, thou foul and fickle temptress. Hello faithful Debian, thy time come round again…

After the debacle that was the attempted upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, I sat back and thought about using Ubuntu for a while. In fact, I’d been thinking about it when I wrote the blog post on the upgrade. And the conclusion I came to was this; I started using Linux with Debian, way back in the days when 3.0 was in testing; I used it on my desktop, on my laptops, on my robot, on the lab server and anywhere else it could fit; and I stayed with it up to the point where I needed some hardware support and was too lazy to build from source, and tried Ubuntu because “all the cool kids were doing it”.

And that was a bad mistake. They may bar me ever re-uping with SAGE for saying something as basic as this in public, but stability is far more important than having the suspend-to-ram function working or faster graphics regardless of whether it’s a mainframe or a laptop, if that is, you’re actually doing work with your computer. I did know that at one point. I blame reading too many Rails sites :D

At any rate, plugged in the external 1394 hard drive, backed up everything (~50Gb in under an hour, sweet), stuck in the netinst cd for Debian Lenny’s amd64 version (feck it, if it didn’t install, I had the i386 handy as a fallback), walked through an incredibly improved installer process, and now I have a pristine system running Gnome, KDE (3), Openbox, Windowmaker, XFCE, LXDE and matchbox (for a project).

The only nonstandard thing in here is that I went and got the 1.2.1 version of Mercurial from the testing repository by hand because otherwise it wouldn’t hg pull from the 1.2.1 repos in the lab.

It’s … Read the rest

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