Kyle Farnung: The Blog

Well, this weekend turned into some sporadic server maintenance. The old server running Fedora Core 3 was getting very rough and took almost 5 minutes to boot for reasons I have no idea. Having a decent amount of time on my hands, I decided to wipe the whole first drive and install Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I was surprised at how well it actually went. I started the install of Ubuntu at about 6:30 and it did take about 1 hour to fully complete on my slow machine. Once that was done, The rest of it took no more than 3-4 hours before it was completely back up and running. Everything appears to be setup correctly, but I'm sure some things with present themselves in time. Either way, all of the sites that I had hosted previously are working. I also added a few more sites to try out, but they will remain a secret for now. If I decide to open them up to the community, then I will make an announcement. In the mean time, feel free to browse around.

It took me quite a while, but the server is back up and fully operational. I'm happy to report that everything seems to be working now and I hope to encounter no more problems. The server is now running Fedora Core 3, mySQL 3.23, and PHP 4.3.11. I had some problems importing the mySQL 4.1 files into mySQL 3.23, but they have all been resolved as of now. I will report back later with less technical stuff.

Since I can't get some of my pages to work with PHP5, I will need to reinstall Fedora Core 3 again. This will take a few hours tonight. I hope to have it all done before I go to bed. We'll see if that really happens...

I finished reinstalling the operating system last night and it should be fully configured now. It seems to be running well with the only outstanding problem being that I can't upload pictures in my blog. I will tackle that later and it may require a little down time to complete. Hopefully I can get it figured out, but it's not the end of the world if I can't.

Due to server maintenance, expect the server to be down for at least a few hours this weekend while I perform the install and configuration.

This weekend, I plan to make some configuration changes to the server. This new configuration will allow me to have much more space for hosting as well as a drive to use for backup. Hopefully this will keep the server useful and safe from hard drive failures and attacks. As far as I can see, I have found the best way to configure it.

Before:

• 46.1 GB Maxtor - Windows XP Pro
• 10 GB IBM - Fedora Core 3 (This server)

After:

• 46.1 GB Maxtor - Fedora Core 4
• 10 GB IBM - Backup

I plan to install and configure the system in a few hours and have it back up and running as usual. I don't anticipate any failures or loss of information in the transition and will keep backups just in case. Sometime in the future I would like to upgrade this system, but it does seem to suit for now. The specs are fairly modest to say the least.

Server Specs:

• Gateway Essential 500
• Intel Pentium III 500 MHz
• 256MB PC100 SDRAM
• 46.1 GB Maxtor Hard Drive
• 10 GB IBM Hard Drive
• Matsushita DVD-III Drive
• NVidia Geforce 2 MX400 64MB
• Creative ES1371 Sound Card
• Linksys LNE-100TX v.4 NIC