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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Starred Due Valley

    Having wandered away from Guild Wars 2 lately, I dabbled with Diablo III for a while until someone sent me a gift on Steam: Stardew Valley.

    You may have heard of it.

    It’s really working for me. I can farm crops, I can raise animals, I can craft things, I can arrange my domain how I please, there are goals to meet (both “kill X in the mines for a reward” and “bring one each of all these things for a reward”), and some days it’s nice to just run around the farm cleaning up debris. And sometimes the game surprises you.

    20160402102548_1When life hands you giant melons, reach for your axe…

    In the upper left corner you’ll note that I have a duck and a bunny, named Plucky and Harey respectively. (Chickens are named Henri, Etta, Clucky, and so forth.) I am bad at pet names, let’s be honest.

    Now, I’m not min-maxing my gameplay. I’m just… having fun. If you’re a casual gamer, Stardew Valley may in fact be an ideal game for you. Possibly.

    Of course, every now and then the game gives you the middle finger.

    20160321200516_1All that gold, no way to reach it because the only exits from my current square are up and out of the mine, or down to the next level…

    If you’re on the fence about trying it out, get in touch. Maybe I could be convinced to send it as a gift. That’s how I got my copy, after all. (I turned around and bought copies for Kyla and my daughter, so paying it forward is accomplished.) It’s only $15, and money well spent.

     

  • 4200 minus 2700 equals Headache

    For most of the calendar year so far we at work have been plowing through a massive reorganization, upgrade, and consolidation of our servers. One of the last stages of this consolidation & upgrade process involved upgrading our Kaseya environment. During the shuffle I found some quirks. For instance, the UserProfiles directory contains roughly 4200 subdirectories, one per agent in the system.

    Problem is, we only have about 2700 agents. The other 1500? Old agents.

    I asked vendor support about this, as the impression I had was that there was an agent archive process. I mean, there’s an archive directory configured in the system, what else is it for if not to archive these agent directories? Heck, the archive directory has agent directories in it.

    Apparently, nope. This isn’t something Kaseya does. I must archive those 1500 directories manually. How did the previous archive directory become populated? No idea at all.

    “Okay,” you might be saying right now, “Just look for the oldest directories.”

    Problem! We just migrated the front-end and database back-end parts of Kaseya to new servers over the last couple weeks! All the directories have brand new dates, all in numerical order, dating from when they were copied off of the old server.

    4100minus2700So this is my life now. Comparing the list of directory names with a list of agent IDs from a report, moving anything not in the report into an archive directory, by hand, one by one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Fun.

  • End of an Era

    Farewell, Node1 server.

    Long live Node2.

    Email has been on Google Apps for a couple weeks now with no problems, websites are all migrated to the new box, and nothing remains of any use on the old system. So, I just turned off and removed the Linode VM of the old server. Had to do it by month’s end or get dinged for another $75, so today was a good day to make that happen.

    It’s always a bit of a downer, shutting off a server you worked so hard to build in the first place. But that’s the way of things.

  • WordPress and comment email

    I… may have only just a few minutes ago fixed a setting that prevented WordPress (and anything else PHP-based) on this new server from sending email.

    Whoops. No comment notifications, for instance.

    On the upside, if this is the worst mistake I make throughout this process then I’ve done pretty damned well.

  • New Server, New Email Service

    If you can read this, then the website migration worked.

    If I get email notification of any comments left for this post, then the email migration worked.

    Okay, the email migration worked and I know it, because I got my daily Ello “inspirational” email newsletter today. Oh, Ello, when are you going to become something people other than froofy artsy-fartsy types will actually want to use?

    Anyway. The email accounts are over on Google Apps now, and all but one of the hosted websites are migrated to the new Linode server. Hopefully I’ll have the last website and the NTP Pool configuration done in a couple of days and I will be able to turn off the old server. Huzzah!

  • Migratory Fowl

    It’s been a bit quiet here because this month I’ve started on a long-overdue project: Migrating the webserver to a… new webserver.

    I’ll try to sum up.

    The current webserver, aka Node1, is a legacy Linode system. It’s a 6GB virtual Linux server of a configuration they don’t even offer anymore, and it started life as an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS system. I upgraded it a while ago because 10.04 LTS went out of support… last year.

    I’d like to get to the current PHP and MySQL versions, but that means either doing a lot of crazy backporting or doing an in-place upgrade. Considering I upgraded from 10.04 to 12.04 and had… issues… I don’t like the idea of performing yet another in-place major OS upgrade. So, I’ve purchased a second Linode system, a 4GB rig this time, and if I can get everything moved in the next two weeks I won’t need to pay the full monthly price for the old box and new box combined.

    We’ll see how that goes.

    Since the 4GB box costs less, I’m using the cost difference to fund getting email into some kind of hosted environment, because damn me but I’m tired of wrangling mail server configurations. Pay someone else to handle that headache? Yes please.

    So that’s what I’m up to. Once this is complete, then I’ll be looking into a couple of creative projects. Honest!

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