VK7HSE's RamblingsI’m currently updating the server from Debian Squeeze to Wheezy. There might be some downtime if I strike any issues.
UPDATE:
Update all complete, so far all looks good. I’ve got a few small things to tidy up (remove warning messages) 🙂
Yesterday (30th November) I rebuilt this server due to a slight problem/mistake that I caused when attempting to install ISPConfig3 on a server that had already been configured with a working environment. Notice how I said ‘working’ because after completing the install of ISPConfig3 this is where things got rather complicated rather quickly! I’ve not had much experience with ISPConfig but I was keen to see how it works and to see if it would make setting up email & web services. Well after 2 actual rebuilds I believe that I’ve managed to achieve what I set out for.
After the ‘First’ install (ISPConfig) It totally broke the server! All Web address resulted in 500 errors! Postfix was complaining about SASL Authentication I knew that I was either going to spend a lot of time trying to sort out the mess or just cheat and start a fresh. So after about 10 seconds, I said to myself…Â “SCREW THIS” let’s just backup what I need and start fresh (something that is clearly stated for ISPConfig!)
Skip forward to mid morning, and things were going well until I enabled squeeze backports, then ran a system update thinking that gives me the advantage of updated software that’s not included with Debian Stable. Oh boy what a “HUGE” mistake that was! My fresh install was now pretty much in the same condition as it was when I broke it!
So again, do I even attempt to work out just how things went so horribly wrong? Oh no screw that! Enter rebuild #2. So one would expect by now that I should have a slight better idea on what/whatnot to do! Yeah OK I’m learning! but in all fairness this server is all about learning. I’m not qualified in this field of work, for me it’s just a hobby.
So there’s going to be broken links until I restore some content (wiki, statusnet, forum) as I’ll be working on that in the coming days… 🙂
Posted from WordPress for Android
Well although I’m not as active as I once was on Identi.ca  I’ve decided to set up my StatusNet instance (again!) on this server. OK you just saw that “again” in brackets what’s with that? Well a while back I attempted to do a similar thing but failed due to my inadequateness to make sense of some of the basics to make your own instance talk to others via Oauth. Well after some help from a few peeps on the !feds group I now have all that sorted (rather easy really I just was not making sense of the docs AGAIN!)
So at this stage this is purely for my own purposes, meaning that I’ve no likely intention to open it up for user registration (aka Identi.ca/StatusNet)
Ok now you can bet that the recent amount of downtime that Identi.ca has experienced will have been fixed and all of this will have been for nothing! but maybe not because this time round I’ve learnt something!  🙂
Update: I’ve recently deleted my account on identi.ca in preference to using my own setup!
Wow has it really been that long? I started experimenting with WordPress back in June 2008 with the intention of setting up a site for the company I was working for so that it was the were to get information within the company (intranet) However, as most things tended to never happen there it was never implemented so not long before I was made redundant I was given the server that hosts this blog (and other services) so I put it to use here at home!
So lets look back at the versions of WordPress, Now as I said I started tinkering in June of 2008 so that would have been version 2.5.1 (yes I cheated, see release history here) Now I won’t give a breakdown of each release as you can read that from the link above! But WordPress has come a long way from my early days, there’s a lot more automated items now where traditionally you would have had to ftp your updates or themes and the like.
Also within the 3 year period my server has changed a lot as well (software) as when I originally started it was using Debian Etch. Although my preferred Linux distribution at the time was Ubuntu 8.04, However for some reason the live CD of either the Desktop or install media for Ubuntu Server wouldn’t recognise the RAID card! So that made for a rather short-lived prospect for running Ubuntu. It wasn’t until Ubuntu 8.10 that I was able to install, as for whatever was the issue on the 8.04 LTS had been either addressed or the necessary module was now included by default. I was also wanting to host my Email server and there was some simple setup prerequisites that Ubuntu Server 8.10 introduced that made setting up Postfix with all the bells and whistles of using Amavis, SpamAssassin & ClamAV to give you a bit of mail cleansing! So Ubuntu remained as the servers OS untill September this year when trying to update to 11.10 when horribly wrong! and I was left with a non working system, Yes I certainly did do a system backup of all the data that I considered important, but this didn’t include a full drive clone though (something I considered but didn’t do!)
I’d become a little displeased with the direction Ubuntu was going anyway (I’d stopped using Ubuntu on my desktop not long after the release of 9.10) and the usage of Plymouth cause me some headaches as the video chip wasn’t up to spec for displaying the intended splash screen associated with Plymouth (even my desktop PC didn’t play nice with Plymouth!) It is my opinion that a server should only show verbose output while booting so you can see if there are any issues, by hiding that (verbose output) behind a splash screen as default was a bad move! So after some thought it was clear to me that my server needed to return to Debian (stable release) so that happened on the 9th of September and hasn’t missed a beat for me.
Now I have to admit that the majority of the content on this blog is really of no significance (to any one else!) but over the time of it’s existence I’ve learnt how to set up a Web server, Email server and a few other monitoring solutions. This blog (well the server really) is purely for my self education and none of this would be possible without Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and the developers that dedicate their time etc…
So will this last another 3 years? … Lets hope so! 😉
The previous post that I mentioned that I was about to rebuild this server was not backed up so its lost in the either! However I’ve removed Ubuntu Server Edition and now the server is using Debian (stable)
During this process I’ve opted not to restore some of the items that I was using previously (mailman, Hylafax, apt-cacher-ng & torrentflux to name a few)
I’ve already noticed a huge improvement (less CPU load) by keeping the server as minimalistic as possible! 😉
Posted from WordPress for Android
Today while I was updating both my desktop & Eee Pc’s I now have the new Debian background that has been approved for Debian 6.0 (squeze) here is what I’m talking about (image taken from my Eee Pc)
So as you can see its quite simple and not distracting to the eye! (as some can be) also the default Grub2 splash image has changed as well, and it to is a nice change from what has ben the standard since Grub2 was adopted in Debian testing.
So my uneducated guess is that Debian 6.0 is just around the corner…
I’ve just had my second update for Me TV accepted into Debian unstable (Sid) 😀
So I have also filed a bug report to sync this new release into Ubuntu Maverick and also uploaded to the Me TV development ppa on LaunchPad. This is to be the last package I do for Ubuntu Karmic, as this release although still supported for security updates has been superseded by Ubuntu Lucid.
Meanwhile, Me TV version 1.3.0 has merged into Debian Testing (Squeeze) and will be replaced with 1.3.1 in 10 days. Whilst version 0.5.33 is in Stable (Lenny)
As of last night I’m now the Debian maintainer for Me TV 😀
The first email that confirmed this was…
me-tv_1.3.0-1_amd64.changes uploaded successfully to localhost
along with the files:
me-tv_1.3.0-1.dsc
me-tv_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz
me-tv_1.3.0-1.debian.tar.gz
me-tv_1.3.0-1_amd64.debGreetings,
Your Debian queue daemon (running on host franck.debian.org)
Then not long after that I got this…
Dear Scott Evans,
Version 1.3.0-1 of your package ‘me-tv’ has just
been uploaded to Debian. We assume that a sponsor uploaded the
package for you.Since your package is sponsored successfully it is no longer
needed here and has been removed from mentors.debian.net.This mail was sent automatically by mentors.debian.net.
In case you have any questions please just reply to this email.
I must say a big thank you to Julian (aka JAK) for assisting me with some minor issues in the packaging that I hadn’t dealt with prior, with his help this has helped me gain the confidence in being fully capable of future updates. This makes updates into Ubuntu much easier! as now all I need to do is a sync request and it will just happen 😉
My Q&A page is located here