Upgrades

Posted by stephen on Sunday, 12th February, 2006 @ 22:05

It's been a rather frustrating weekend geek wise. But good otherwise.

Continuing the Stephen Fry love in that is me at the moment, last night I finished reading Making History. And I only started reading it on Thursday night, so it must have been good (and indeed it was). Can definitely recommend it, an exploration into what the world would be like if Hitler had never been born (spoiler: different, not better).

I'm really enjoying this reading business, as my slowly filling TiVo can prove. And I seem to have sped up somewhat over the course of two books. It's almost like I'd forgotten how to read non-geek or non-journalistic prose.

Anyway, the reason I managed to get through so much was two very late nights and then yesterday being stuck in front of the computer for 7 hours or so occasionally prodding neuron2 (the server this site and many others are hosted on) whenever it was available.

I'm not sure quite what took it down in the first place, there wasn't anything in the logs to indicate a problem. Unfortunately, upon reboot things didn't progress much further than "Uncompressing kernel". For a while now EV1's serial console server has been inaccessible to me, so it took me a little while to even find this out.

Then I discovered that my DNS secondary didn't agree that being a secondary to the domains on the server was one of it's jobs, so even other sites not directly hosted became unavailable.

Long story short, a new disk has been added with the stock RedHat install and I've mounted my RAID set and chrooted into it and got everything running again in a very temporary fashion. A couple of attempts to get the original Debian install booting natively have failed, and without the serial console I can't find out why.

Unfortunately EV1's system admin guys aren't in again till tomorrow morning, so the serial console won't be working again till then, which means I can't do much until then.

Annoyingly they'll want to whip out either the new disk they put in or the original master disk within 48 hours of yesterday's titsup.com event. I don't really want to be taking the machine down during the day in attempts to make it work, there would be many phone calls!

Fortunately because I've got a two-disk server and am using Software RAID, so I can kick out the old master from the RAID set and have them remove it this evening. Then when things hopefully start working properly again the new disk can be assimilated into the RAID set and be nicely Debianified.

Other notable upgrade headaches include Quills, the blogging product I use for Plone. I moved from 0.9 beta 2 to the final release a couple of days ago and didn't actually notice that it completely broke the archive along with the ability to read blog posts individually.

I managed to track it down just now to my customisations of a little bit of code that deals with said archive and posting display. As I don't make use of the categories feature I'd removed some code that deals with displaying a post's category. Because of the way Plone works, I'd effectively taken a whole wedge of code from the beta version and told Plone it should use it in preference to that which was installed by the original product. Obviously there'd been a few changes to the final release. Never mind, fixed now and I'm sure no one noticed. Especially not with 12 hours downtime yesterday!

I'm hoping one day to actually stop using Plone and start using something of my own devising, along with some other stuff I really want to build to bring in a few pennies. But I'm currently waiting with baited breath for Django and TurboGears to reach version 1.0 so they won't make changes that break anything I might try to build now. Then finally I might be able to choose between them. Oh well, at least I can be content that my website is Python powered now, albeit with a thick layer of gooey Zopey fudge on top.

Another non-geek upgrade is my front door. Not longer is my house fronted by a draft-enabling, minimally-secure bit of wood. Now there's a lovely bit of no doubt environmentally damaging uPVC which seems to make to the whole thing air tight. And there's now enough big bits of metal that slide into other bits of metal to keep any insurance company happy.

There's another upgrade too, but I'm not going to tell you about that. Well, not yet.