After many years of running Polarblog I’ve decided to migrate to another blogging system, not because I don’t love Kevin (the author) but because it was just that time. We’ll see if it works out. That’s about it. I’ve imported a selection of the old posts into the new system and left the rest behind.

Just about everything I’m going to restore has been. It has taken a long time (probably 30+ hours in the last 3-4 days) but all the services are running again and the data I intend on keeping online is back in place.

A summary of some changes:

1. Because the box I’m currently running has less hard drive space I’ve removed part of the picture archive and some other things of that nature from the website for now.

2. I switched picture inventory software. Although I love IDS (Image Display System) every time install Perl Magick (a perl interface for Image Magick) it takes hours and hours of fighting compilers and trying to get everything running. I decided it just wasn’t worth it at this time.

3. I’ve reorganized and cleaned up a bit. There are less sections to the weblog – I just wasn’t using some of them so I decided to eliminate them. There were also several webpages which I didn’t have any need to link off the main page anymore so I eliminated them.

4. The weblog lost a substantial amount of data. When I reinstalled I upgraded to the newest version of the weblog software and started the weblog over. My successful backup of the weblog was a couple months old (even though I had backups of the rest of the site made the day before the crash) since I hadn’t been performing a routine dump on the data. So, there have been quite a few things readded but not everything is there. The most noteable are some technical articles on building OpenBSD mail relay servers to act as a bastion/smarthost for your network to protect your mail servers with the databases on them and some other articles on other types of servers, exchange implimentations, domain implimentations, etc. that I have written. Also lost were a bunch of what I guess you could call motivational weblog articles. No need to restore those since I will always be able to come up with more motivational or opinion articles.

If you find any areas of the website which are still broken please E-Mail me.

Thanks.

-Alan

The day of the new server being fully online has finally arrived.

From the Internet everything should be cool and fully functional. If you do run into any oddities please let me know.

On the backend I’m still ironing out some things. We had to switch daemons for several different services and now the backend is running Linux (debian) so we have full SMP support.

I’ve personally noticed that it seems like a much snappier server. For my personal functions it seems to be moving right on along.

So, with this happening I can finally go back to actually writing material for the website and focusing on doing other fun stuff.

If you would like some statistics: I’ve had the server about 2.5 weeks. In that time I’ve spent about 40 (est) hours installing and messing wtih software getting everything together.

As I mentioned earlier we have moved to Debian Linux from OpenBSD. This is so that I get full hardware support and have the ability to use SMP. This is a non-preferred transition to me. Over the last year+ I have discovered that OpenBSD is my preferred OS but Debian has been my preferred Linux distro for awhile so I don’t mind to much.

Sometimes I get asked why I chose not to run Linux. All of the latest software and hardware is first supported under Linux, why wouldn’t I want to be there?

The answer has a couple different parts.

The first is security. OpenBSD always left me in a position where I felt comfortable with my machine. I knew what everything was, where it was and why it was doing it. If the slightest thing changed I knew about it and could react properly. The good part is that I never had to react, unlike on my Solaris server several years ago where I ended up getting rooted – that was the start of my security-paranoia. Proactive security is easy to acheive under OpenBSD because it comes pre-locked. You don’t have to spend your time figuring out how to get it so it is secure in the first place.

Secondly, OpenBSD is small and effective. I could always recognize every service, always knew what was running and why it was running. This comes right back to security. It also has easily understood firewall configuration which works very effectively and supports most hardware I typically use.

Now, the advantages of us moving to Debian. Latest software support – almost everything compiles under linux this day and time. Another advantages is the joys of apt-get, which if you are a linux user you probably at least have heard of. It makes installing and managing software a snap even though with the ports tree under OpenBSD it works very well for managing software.

Also, with linux you get the latest hardware support which isn’t a concern for my 5 year old server.

Plus, the support community for linux is huge and very good. This is always good stuff (insert plug for AKLUG here).

Anyway, changes have to happen from time to time. Perhaps one day if OpenBSD gets SMP support we will move back to that but for now we will run Debian and be happy.

For those of you other-bsd users out there – yes, I wanted to run FreeBSD on the box but ended up running into some hardware related issues with the latest FreeBSD so that might be another one I try later on.

So, go, frolick, download, upload and have a very happy new years.

-Alan

On July 10th sometime during the night the primary webserver for the site failed. We were in the process of doing a backup when it went down.

It appears that 3 drives in the RAID array died. I’m not sure what caused it at this time but until I have time to troubleshoot the machine further and replace failed hardware (Ebay is my friend since this is my home machine :^)) we are going to switch to a different method of serving the website.

I’ve moved critical services over to another machine so that business can continue but some portions of the website have not been re-added at this current time.

My ETA on having the majority of the website back into place will be Saturday. It would be sooner but it has been busy around work and tommorow night I will be doing a customer network conversion so I suspect that nothing will happen tommorow night.

The good news about this incident is that it gives me an oppurtunity to do some serious housecleaning and get the box back into good shape. I’ve got some other ideas for new backup methods so that there is always an online backup but that is still in developement. If I pull it off I’m sure I will write some massive weblog entry on the topic :^).

So, that is about it. If you have any questions please let me know.

-Alan

The new server is shaping up nicely. There have been some hitches but it is coming together quickly at this point. From the current response and the way it is interacting I suspect it will be a real demon (daemon maybe.. he he..alright, that was bad) when it’s running..

Took a couple of hours to download all the system configuration utilities, which are a must for many servers then I had to hunt down the Mylex raid controller configuration utilities and bios updates so it would be supported by current un*x/linux variants.

After dinking with it for 4-5 hours I finally got it so it had a raid 5 array with 3 drives and 1 spare and was all ready to have something installed on it.

Out of the 4 linux distro’s I had here and 2 bsd variants (openbsd and freebsd) the only one which was completely plug and play was redhat but after installing it and configuring it I remembered exactly why I don’t use redhat for servers anymore – if I don’t know what all the crap on the machine does then it isn’t secure enough for me. With redhat you can install the stripped install and still end up with hundreds of files and utilities which are worthless to you. Then I had to go off and play with the configs and init scripts and everything… so, I decided that although redhat loaded out of the box it wasn’t worth it. Between the adjustment curve and the amount of crap I was being forced to de-rpm it was turning into a battle I didn’t want to fight. Plus, I could almost never guarantee the security of the machine if I didn’t understand most of what was running (filters will only take you so far).

OpenBSD (my preference) didn’t make the cut – no SMP support yet. FreeBSD said it supported the controller but it didn’t even boot to be installed. Insert some other distros here.. After reading the docs I downloaded all the necessary Debian boot floppies (my preferred linux distro) and got it going. Many hours had passed but at least now I can be comfortable with what my machine is running.

For those of you who have used debian for any real amount of time you are probably familiar with apt-get. After the base install I rebooted, promptly exited the secondary phase of configuration and started the process of loading only what I wanted. First gcc, then libstdc, base86 then kernel (break for recompiling the way I wanted), openssh (ahh, back to my desktop – no more flipping keyboards), apache, mysql, and all sorts of other good stuff.

So it is coming along nicely now. It’ll still be a couple days before I start the migration. This server runs a MTA, NTP for my home network, ssh, apache, mysql, djbdns and several other things which will have to be migrated.

Now you know why there haven’t been any new wonderful articles or other exciting things posted recently. Between the new server prep, holidays and work not much time.. but in theory I will have at least 5 straight days off next week which will give me plenty of time to catch up on sleep… uhh, wait, no, server work, ya, that’s the ticket :^).

And now we resume our regularly scheduled slacking..