While I was waiting for something to break (I didn’t have to wait that long, it turns out, as the crappy DOS-based log-handling software our Traffic department uses has up and decided to hate running under WinXP), I upgraded my Linux workstation from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3.

You know what? It worked almost flawlessly. I only had to do a bit of apt-get patch-and-fill to make all the quirks go away, and most of the quirks were my own doing anyway. Wow.

So, at least something went right today…

Now that the new server has stabilized, and now that I’ve switched from the not-updated-since-August-2003 Analog to the bright and new AWStats for website reporting, I can relax and do fun things like dig through this month’s search queries for nuggets of bloggy goodness.

The anime site is generating its fair share of traffic, especially from fans of Popotan, Stellvia, Bottle Fairy and Mai Hime. Oddly enough, nobody used any inappropriate search phrases in that category this time around. (Whew.)

I can’t say the same about whoever found me by searching for “peter pan slash fiction.” Ewww. Just, ewww. Oh, and if you’re searching for “google” on Google, you need professional help. And the less said about “penis sizes for a 15 year old,” the better.

I’m surprised that the “Sorry Everybody” site (scroll down if you’re that curious, though one would think everyone’s seen it by now) generated so much traffic to this page. I mean, it’s not like people come here for compelling spiffy new meme-like stuff. But hey, whatever works. I even earned a couple of semi-spammy comments from it.

One wonders what spurs someone to search for “mormon tractor trailer rig.” Hmm.

I don’t know if I can help you “troubleshoot pumpkin pie not set up,” but if you give me said pumpkin pie I’ll be willing to give it a taste. Er, try. *cough*

Workplace entries, particularly personality-specific posts, generate some traffic. People still want to know about Marconi and Tiny, and wonder if I have any new anecdotes about Daria O’Neil, and so on. The answer in both cases is “no,” which is fortunate or unfortunate depending on your point of view.

And for the very, very small handful of you who were looking for the Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater and the Past, Present, Future archives… all I can say is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, “Sorry everybody!”

More bullet-points from the field of battle:

• First I had to add shell info to each of the user accounts before FTP would work. Then I had to tell ProFTPd where it could go stick its notion of defaulting to a chroot home directory login for all users. On account of this, RDS info for many of our stations’ websites was nonexistent until midday. Argh.
• The default Apache config file in Fedora Core 3 is set not to run CGI scripts. Um, what? (This broke Mari’s and Dawn’s sites. Argh.)
• The upgrade to a newer version of PHP somehow managed to leave our comments script mysteriously broken. Luckily someone posted a simple and effective fix on the dotcomments support group. Whew. I’d never have figured that one out on my own.
• While trying to solve the previous mystery, I discovered that ‘jhead’ was missing on the server. This is a JPEG header information program that Gallery uses… and we have Gallery installed a few times on this server, donchaknow.

I’m sure there’ll be more. There’s no way I can be allowed to get more than three consecutive hours of sleep, after all…

So the next time I get a bright idea in my head to upgrade the webserver, remind me what a disaster this turned out to be. Please?

Let’s see how many things can go wrong in one server upgrade:

• Grub strangeness post-install, requiring use of the “rescue” mode of the install CD.
• An intensely frustrating experience trying to make networking work, solved hours later by the discovery that SMP kernels don’t like APM/ACPI on some motherboards. Oh, isn’t that nice. By the time I got this one figured out it was too late to catch a bus home.
• The VirtualHost directive in Apache 2.x is ever-so-slightly different from what it was in 1.3. Just enough to give me the better part of an hour’s frustration.
• When you’re already tired (and very hungry), trying to make Qmail work isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It doesn’t help when you’re a doofus who forgets to turn off Sendmail before firing up Qmail. Ouch.
• Courier-IMAP gave me similar headaches.
• I couldn’t figure out for the longest time where the ‘maildir’ script came from that I was using in my .qmail files. Oh, turns out it’s actually ‘safecat’. Duh?

And that’s just the stuff that takes me to, oh, right now. That would be 2:30 in the Ayy Emm, thank you very little.

Bah. I couldn’t get home now if I wanted to…

On Friday, the 18th of January, 2002 I made the first post on my new domain, greyduck.net. I’d had a journal elsewhere before, but it was shut down after about a year. (Some of its posts survive here, mostly in the Thoughts category.)

As I posted the meme entry just below, I realized with a bit of shock that it was post #999. Now, the Monaural Jerk system in its earlier incarnations had some strangeness in its numbering scheme (it had to do with how media review entries were filed, I believe) but still… I’m now at the four-digit level. I’ve made just about one thousand actual posts.

By the by: I’d like to thank Matt McGlynn for the MJ system and his patient assistance over the years making this thing work in the bodged-up fashion I have here. Also, as of this post, I’ve changed my webserver configuration so that the clunky “/journal.php/”-based URL scheme is gone, in favor of just “/journal/”. (The old links still work, mind you, thanks to a symlink I made for backward compatibility.) This configuration matches what I set up for Lil’, and what Matt uses on debris.com. It’s a good time to make a clean change, wouldn’t you say?

In a way, I didn’t actually believe I’d get this far when I started. I’m an infamous dilettante, after all. I get started on something, all full of excitement, and then I get bored and move on. But I’m still here. Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for me yet. Now I just need to learn how to post interesting content, eh?

Here’s to the next thousand. May they not be another three years in the posting!