DrBacchus' Journal

I just retired a server that has been doing loyal service as a variety of things over the last 6 or 7 years. It was an old Dell desktop machine, and it served as my mail server, DNS server, database server, and quite a few other things. I think I may have just realized one service that didn't get migrated off of it - a couple of IRC bots which have been dormant for quite some time.

For a while, it also hosted fajita, the bot who answers most of the questions on #apache, on irc.freenode.net, but that moved off about 2 years ago.

And just a few moments ago ...

rbowen@shiraz:~% sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Mon May  5 20:36:46 2008):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
rbowen@shiraz:~% Connection to shiraz closed by remote host.
Connection to shiraz closed.

The goal is eventually to move everything up to slicehost, and I'll probably move my mail servers to Google while I'm at it. I'm tired of being a sysadmin, but not tired enough of it to just have a normal web host.

I picked up a couple new toys this weekend. One, in particular, I'm very fond of. I got an iPod Touch, for use as my primary PDA, calendaring, note-taking, mobile computing thingy. Overall, I'm *way* impressed with it. It's quite a feat of engineering.

What I found frustrating about it from the very beginning - even before I had one - was the lack of availability of third-party applications for it. Granted, it's a very young device. I had a Palm device more than 10 years ago, and even then there were hundreds of third-party apps for Palm. Now there are thousands. And for the iPod, I can't find any.

Now, I know there are some, and that you can install them if you install hackish jailbreak software on the iPod. And, I'll probably do this. But I find it perplexing that a company as savvy as Apple would choose to release a device that didn't from day one, make it easy for third-party companies and hobbyists to provide apps for it. Nothing inspires device loyalty like an app that fills just exactly the need that you have. And, frankly, the default apps on the iPod are unimaginative. And ... duh ... no games. Who thought that made sense? At least put solitaire on here. Sheesh.

Having said that, the ease of use of the device, and the obviousness of use, impress me. There's never a doubt of what you're supposed to do to accomplish what you want.

One other complaint, I guess. The networking hides just a little too much detail from me. I needed to know my MAC address this afternoon, so that I could add the device to the permit list on my parent's 802.11 AP, and I couldn't find it anywhere. It's one of the Linksys devices, and I had to pick my device out of a list of other devices that had tried to access the AP, presumably neighbors, and I just couldn't do it in the time I had available.

Oh, well, mostly thumbs up, and I imagine I'll like it more, the more I rely on it.

My server (ie, the one on which this site runs) is having some kind of hardware failure. I presume the fan is going out, but it might be more serious than that. Periodically the kernel tells me that the CPU is overheating, and then powers down the system. At the moment, I have a large room fan pointing into the side of the open case, but that is obviously only a short-term solution.

I have a secondary server, which runs my DNS and database, but it's a Pentium III 600, and I'm not certain, yet, whether it can take the additional load. I guess I'm about to find out. Unfortunately, it's running Slackware, which I have distinctly fallen out of love with in the last 5 years or so. And so moving a bunch of services from this machine to that one may end up being rather painful.

Then there's the alternate plan, of purchasing a new server, and combining the two into the one. Unfortunately, that involves spending money.

So, at the moment, I'm not sure what I'll be doing. But if this site is down, it's probably because the overheating problem got worse.

Seriously, I didn't think anybody else memorized those codes.

For those of you who don't get the joke, here's the code. And, yes, I had them memorized.