The machine that has powered this website for the last six years is on its way out. The hard drive has not been replaced in that long and is starting to show its age. Unfortunately, because I was expecting this day would soon come but not so suddenly, I didn’t have an adequate financial plan in place to replace the machine outright. So, in the mean time, I will be hosting lazylightning.org off a backup server that I purchased a while ago for $40.
The interim server will be a P3-733 that will hopefully have the same amount of RAM (it should be compatible just from eyeballing it) and a smaller HD. The performance will probably end up being somewhat similar being that the current machine is a 1.8Ghz Celeron and it’s simply a server and doesn’t run anything else. We shall see.
If the current machine makes it to the weekend, which I hope it will, there will be some downtime while I make the switch over. I hope to have all bugs ironed out before that time but being that I haven’t done a full Linux install in quite some time (the current machine has been up for 401 days and counting) and I don’t remember every last thing I require, there may be some glitches. Otherwise, you shouldn’t notice anything unless you’re up and surfing the site after 2 AM…
If you’re generous and want to donate to the cause, send me an e-mail, both myself and The Budget Nazi will thank you ;-)
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November 6th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
You got me wondering: What powers this website? (SW/HW-wise)
November 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Hardware is a 1.8Ghz Celeron (circa 10/2002) with 1.5GB of RAM and a 40GB HD running Debian GNU/Linux. Network connection is via a Frontier residential DSL line at ~4000/490 with Visi as the ISP. I host lazylightning’s DNS (Bind 9.x) and SMTP (Sendmail 8.13.8) as well as plenty of other necessary (and some unnecessary) crap internally. Database backups are to two separate internal magnetic devices, one external, and also a GMail account all of which are updated every 3 hours.
Originally the website was powered with Drupal but back in March I completely redesigned the site and switched the software to WordPress (which is currently sitting at version 2.6.3) because it’s faster, easier to upgrade, and the comment spam handling is far superior to what was offered out of the box from Drupal (which is probably the biggest reason for the dramatic rise in the number of comments seen).
As I mentioned above, the website will be moving to a P3-733 with similar amounts of RAM (I believe the current server has three slots whereas the new one has 4 so I may be able to bump it up a little) which is circa 2000. I am planning to upgrade to a Intel dual core CPU (is Mhz/Ghz relevant anymore?) with at least 2GB+ of RAM and whatever HD is minimum as I just don’t have a big space requirement on the server. This upgrade will likely take place early in 2009.
I have no intentions of switching away from WordPress anytime in the foreseeable future but I do have some changes on the way as far as category structure goes (thanks to a reader e-mail that I received today) which will break “Restaurants” down even further into “Cuisine”. I haven’t decided if it will be a category or a tag (which are currently unused) but I’ll see how it works out.
I have absolutely no web design skills and I thank Gregg for his work on the banner. Crazily enough, it slid right into the theme and color scheme I had chosen for the site back in late February. I have toyed with some ideas in this area including developing “icons” for posts (like Police Calls) which usually come with no pictures — but obviously w/o skills, that won’t happen.
While I have detracted a bit from the original question, if you have any suggestions on how to improve navigation, content, etc, please drop me a line via e-mail or post a comment below and as time allows, I will see what we can do to make the site work better for everyone.
November 8th, 2008 at 4:54 am
1. As of 0352 CST everything (aside from old Gallery links — I’m going to kill these off) *seems* to be working on the web side. We’ll see if that holds true after I sleep. Please e-mail me if you notice anything that’s not working.
2. RAM is not compatible. If anyone has PC-100 sticks for cheap please let me know.
3. Bleh, I don’t want to do this again in January :(
November 8th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Fought with Sendmail allowing relaying for several hours this morning and finally gave up and went with Exim. Site was down for an additional hour between 12:40 and 13:40 CST while I got it switched over.
Debian Etch’s sendmail 8.13.x sucks. That is all.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Not sure what the problem is but I’m still experiencing very high load on the machine. I assumed it was an issue with MySQL so I “upgraded” to an unstable version available via Debian etch’s backports. I have been closely monitoring the database activity and I haven’t the fainest fucking idea what’s wrong.
Sorry for the downtime — I hope to have this cleared up eventually.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:52 am
After several hours of troubleshooting yesterday it seems I have narrowed down the problem and since adding a bit more RAM (thanks Tim), upgrading to WP 2.7b2, changing MySQL and Apache settings, moving Exim to a daemonized process, and much other fucking around, the server is holding its own — for now.
Be gentle ;)