I'm not dead...

Just haven't felt like posting in a while (or rather, I've felt like it, got as far as a draft and then just went "fuck it, no-one will care anyway" - yay depression). Anyway yeah... still alive, although haven't really been up to much of note.

 

I'll try to post something more substantial soon.

Well, that… was easy actually.

The backup system I was using (basically, dump everything into dated folders every night over SMB) was pretty wasteful of disc space and hard to find specific revisions in, so I’ve changed it to something more snazzy (Mercurial repositories).

And while I was on I made the server from scratch. As you do. (I did actually have valid reasons – I much prefer administering Arch to Debian, and the amount of things I ended up wanting to change (lighttpd to nginx, MySQL to MariaDB, move to btrfs…) meant it was as good an excuse as any to switch distro). Yay for that intoxicating new server smell. :D

I am having problems getting mysqldump to do so in table-sized chunks though, which would be a better fit for the revision-control-based backup system. It’s saying it can’t write to the file/folder (even when I made said folder chmod –R 0666). Any ideas?

A few bits and bobs…

I have rainbow hair now, as does Will:

(yes, it was for Pride and yes, we liked it enough to keep it afterwards although it’s getting slightly washed out-looking now)

Pride was fun – for once it didn’t piss it down (quite the opposite in fact – sunburn was had by all). Sad that Glenn couldn’t stay long enough to go, but Geraint (a friend from deviantART) was with us, apparently his first time at Pride ever.

He got rainbowed too:

Oh, and on Saturday I proposed to Will. He said yes. :D

Home again, home again…

Got back about half an hour ago, complete with our new pet for the week, Glenn. Sad to see the back of Ireland, but all things being well that won’t be a problem for much longer. :)

Didn’t get as much done as we’d have liked thanks to BAD THINGS happening to the car – it decided enough was enough on our third day there or so, and it turned out the fuel pump’s wiring had broke. So Will, Glenn’s brother and his friend fixed it (at much risk of exploding, apparently) only for the hose going into (or out of, not sure which colour does what) the pump not to go back in again. That was fixed with judicious use of stiff wire and silicone and it seemed to be the end of it, but then when we went to get fuelled up to come back the tank managed to pop its top and spill petrol all over the place – apparently it wasn’t screwed on tight enough. Cue the most terrifying drive in history back to Glenn’s where David again did awesome things and got us back on the road; we haven’t exploded yet so it’s probably good.

In other news, we found out how to go about moving there – apparently we need an Ireland address before we can get a bank account, NI number equivalent (can’t remember what it’s called) or pretty much anything. So that needs to be sorted first.

T minus…um… SOON

Heading off to Ireland for the week in about 2 hours – made the flat somewhat tidy, put cat & server maintenance instructions on the wall for mam, got my email working again (apparently I’d screwed up the DNS so it was getting sucked into a black hole)… think we’re about ready. :)

All we wanted were some plates!

The other day we went to Ikea to get kitchenware – we only really have enough for the two of us, and Glenn’s impending visit was as good an excuse as any. And then this happened.

We weren’t hurt thankfully, but honestly… what a palaver.

Done(ish)

Well, I think that’s everything set up, bar one or two minor things. Hopefully I won’t have to wrangle with too many more regexps; getting the favicon showing up as it should was quite a pain (how was I supposed to know rewrite rules are applied sequentially? Oh right… RTFM. At least it’s sorted now). Having trouble getting Google Webmaster Tools to re-verify the site – I put the meta tag in but it’s not seeing it for some reason – but I’m sure I’ll figure that out eventually. EDIT Must have been a caching thing... went to check when I got up and it had worked.

Also, the mess with 000webhost has me thinking about implementing a proper backup system… something along the lines of setting up a cron job to send the relevant stuff (site files, database dump & server config) over to the host system regularly. Should be easy enough (and if I install a samba client on the server, shouldn’t require any extra things installed on the host either). :)

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to sleep now.

Paul SMASH!

My webhost suspended my site… somehow it was using >20% CPU and they didn’t like this (despite it being most likely their own fault: I fail to see how a single, low-traffic Wordpress blog on a properly configured server could hog resources like that). So they took my site down (would have been nice if they’d told me – I only found out when I tried to log in and got a 404 page), and now they’re holding it to ransom… they won’t put it back up or even send/let me download my data unless I pay for a ~premium~ account and get reactivated, and they won’t refund the charge for the premium account even if I only use it to recover my data and then get the hell away from them. Fuck 000webhost, basically.

So, given that I have a static IP address, plenty of RAM and (after a quick Google search) a nice tray based headless VM manager, I’ve set up a Debian server here instead – I’ll probably move it to a low-power dedicated box at some point, but this will do for now.

Still got a few plugin-related tweaks to do probably (and, as I can’t remember what I had in my Links sidebar before, feel free to comment with links to your sites and I’ll put them in), but yeah – here’s to fresh starts. :)