greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • 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!

  • It’s probably a bad idea

    I just had a terrible idea. I’m not even sure I can put together the elements I need in order to even attempt pulling it off. But the idea delights me so much that I’m going to damned well try to.

    And I think I won’t buy yet another domain name or build a whole separate website to do it, either. That’s right, I’m going to put this right where people may or may not be expecting to be seeing things already. Some of you may be amused by the result. Others will likely roll eyes skyward, possibly coupled with prayers for my immortal soul.

    Cue the maniacal, diabolical laughter.

  • The Riveting Adventure Of The Grey Quaggan

    Kyla loves the Guild Wars 2 MMO game. I mean, I like it too, but she likes and plays the game far, far more than I do. Which is fine, it’s good to have something fun to do.

    In the game, one of the fantastical races are called Quaggans. They’re sort of little aquatic blobs with funny voices. Kyla bought herself a purple plush one to add to the stuffed-critter menagerie in the apartment.

    Guess who received a grey quaggan for Christmas?

    So, last weekend she took the Amtrak Cascades northward to visit folks for a post-Christmas kind of thing, leaving me alone. Well, alone if you don’t count the new grey quaggan, along with all the other stuffed what-have-yous.

    GreyQuagganBoardGameI took this as an opportunity to post a silly little photo series on Instagram, which I’ve replicated for posterity in this gallery. Enjoy, won’t you?

  • The Linkage Awakens

    Kylanath and I went to see that new War In The Stars movie thing. In a theater, no less.

    My spoiler-free reaction?

    I liked “The Force Awakens”, mainly due to how incredibly fun and engaging the new characters are. Also, it’s occasionally an incredibly pretty film, what with the panoramic backgrounds full of crashed Imperial Star Destroyers and what-not. (Be cynical on your own turf. I’m not immune to well-done nostalgia.)

    On an almost unrelated note, one of the things I realized that I can do with this site is to tell you, dear reader, about things I like. Sure, this was always supposed to be a journal. (Was I ever good at journal-ing? Probably not.) But back while it was a more active web location, this site served the same function for me that Twitter does now: Quick thoughts, and links to stuff elsewhere on the Internets that I find amusing/informative/etc.

    So. Let’s do more of that latter thing, the linky-ness. And to tie this back into today’s theme, I’m going to link to the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome podcast’s website. This past Thursday they put up an episode all about the aforementioned new movie, and I agree with pretty much all of their reactions, so listening to them for an hour will give you a good idea how I feel. (I’m 100% less tipsy than they were when they recorded, mind you.) And if that’s not enough, I wrote a blog post’s worth of comment on their post. Ahem.

    Be aware, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, do that first and then follow this link to the “KlaxOn! KlaxOff!” episode of the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome. Enjoy, won’t you?

  • Goodbye Gallery, Hello… Piwigo?

    Since the Menalto Gallery project seems to have shut down some time back in 2014, I have switched to… Piwigo. The bulk import went well enough, though this does mean that links in old posts here are going to be horribly broken.

    Link rot. It happens to the best of us, and also me.

    Check out the new gallery (full of the same old pictures), won’t you?

  • It’s Almost Like I Know What I’m Doing

    I just completed an important and long-neglected task: The backups for my webserver have been reinvented and improved. This isn’t to say I haven’t been making backups previously, mind you! I had a (somewhat) cumbersome system of weekly tarballs and nightly rsync-over-ssh jobs going on. It was a bit I/O intensive, though. The opposite of efficiency.

    The new system consists of:

    • My home QNAP with the rsync app.
    • My home firewall configured to route rsync traffic to the QNAP, but only from my webserver’s IP address. (There’s still a good username/password involved as well.)
    • A group of organized, nested target directories on the QNAP.
    • A string of rsync commands in a nightly cron job script which update the QNAP’s copy of each of the websites, each email account’s mail store, the website database dumps and a few key configuration directories out of /etc.

    This setup should cut down on disk I/O on the webserver as well as nightly transfer rates. (I look forward to not seeing any more Sunday morning “hey, we noticed that your disk I/O is higher than normal” alert emails from the fine folks at Linode, if nothing else.) Note that this backup scheme is in addition to Linode’s nightly server snapshots for disaster recovery.

    I configured the IP address for our home as a ‘hosts’ file entry, so when (inevitably) Frontier changes it on us, all I have to do to fix the backup job is to update that entry appropriately. (A near-future project: Detecting and alerting on communication errors in the backup script…)

    Next up? A bunch of software upgrades and migrations, particularly now that the Gallery Project has shut down. D’oh!

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