For a good long while now, I’ve used Feed on Feeds as my aggregator of choice. It requires a bit of setup on the webserver end, but I like tinkering around with my webserver. All went well up until the point we were forced to move to a new server, and then another problem cropped up with one of the software upgrades to said new server.

I didn’t notice the latest problem until this evening. It’s the first time I’ve logged into the server itself in quite some time. (To make note of the glorious uptime we’ve finally achieved would be to invite disaster, so I won’t.) Looking in my home directory, I was horrified to see thousands of files named “update-quiet.php.XXXX” where the X’s are numbers anywhere from 1 to 2800. You see, I was forced to switch from using ‘/usr/bin/GET’ to using ‘wget’ for running the FoF updates, and the ‘wget’ utility pretty much insists on creating a local file. Ugh. (There’s now an entry in my crontab to clear those files periodically, but still. Ugh.)

FoF has given me other problems over the months, and since there’s not been an update to the software in ages, I pondered alternatives. “Hmm,” I thought, “what about that Google feed reader they were making noise about a while back?” When they first announced it, I tried uploading my exported feed list to it only to get a response equivalent to, “Huh?”

So imagine my surprise when I went to look at “my” Google Reader page and found that it’s been quietly pulling down entries for… well, however long it’s been since I gave it my OPML file in the first place. (Memory isn’t my strong suit.) I had to go through and clean out some feeds for sites I don’t read anymore, and add in a few new ones, but other than that… it’s alive and kicking, and surprisingly slick.

For the foreseeable future, then, I’m going to let Google be my web-based aggregator. If it does at least a good of a job as FoF and without the headaches, I’ll make the switch permanent. If anyone else wants to give it a whirl but lacks a Gmail invite (are there any of you left without one?) just let me know.

Epilogue: The very moment I tried to post this entry, the server crashed. See what I mean about mentioning that month of uptime? Argh. I suspect the only way to stop the crashes is to double the RAM again… but that’s another $20 per month that I can’t afford right now. Shoot me now?

A little bit of geek humor to make your day complete:

“May the 4th be with you.”

Go on. You know you want to use this yourself at some point today, don’t you? Don’t you?

After an hour or so of gaming followed by most of an hour on the phone with a particular someone special, I decided to indulge in a pasttime I’ve all but given up in the last few years. Yes, I put on my headphones and listened to music for a while. Hey, the computer was on anyway, trying valiantly to download some anime for my later enjoyment.

(Keep in mind, now, that a week ago we upgraded the memory in this webserver, and that it hadn’t had a crash for roughly a week before that, even, thanks in part to some configuration tweaks I made a week or so prior to the scheduled upgrade.)

Imagine my chagrin when I decided to check my email one last time before bed (what? oh, like you don’t. go on, pull the other one.) only to stare in horror at the hourglass cursor as Thunderbird utterly failed to connect to my server. I switched to the console screen and tried a ping. No dice. I could ping, and visit, any number of other addresses… just not mine. I took the next logical step, of course. I called Infinity Internet‘s tech support number and left a detailed message. Once I completed the call, on a whim born out of what could be called a stubborn refusal to accept facts, I tried the ping again.

You can probably guess what happened.

Once I finished rolling my eyes in disgust, I placed another call to Infinity’s support line to let them know not to bother rebooting my server…

As near as I can tell, something external to the server went dead for a little while. The evidence is this line in the /var/log/messages file:

e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex

The gist is, that notation tells me that the network cable was unplugged or inactive in some fashion, then came back online, which spawned that “watchdog” message. (Now if only there were watchdog messages about the link being down, I could get a handle on how long we were offline. Argh.) And since that’s the only indication that anything at all went wrong, I’m going with the “someone tripped over a Cat5 cable” theory, until a better theory comes along.

All’s well that ends well, though.