I broke the site tonight. I was trying to disable it like I would if I were renting it and didn’t pay my bill. I’m trying to work out the bugs. Who knows… maybe I’ll start my own webserver business.
Anyway, I got it back up within the hour, but there still may be quirks. I’ll remember not to press that delete button again. 
I ripped apart my server and Kristie’s machine over the past few days playing with various pieces and parts in different configurations. Unfortunately I was only able to use the CPU out of her machine. The ram wouldn’t fit, and I simply wasn’t willing to take my server offline for 5-6 days to get everything running the way it should. Oh well… this machine is getting to it’s end life anyway.
I did have a chance to play around with the installation process a bit on her machine prior to ripping it apart. After installing the entire system as far as I could without having a real IP 4 times, I’ve pretty well got it nailed down. I’m still a bit concerned about the mail setup, as well as the Gallery and Wordpress setup. Unfortunately, these 3 pieces can’t be setup correctly without a true net connection.
Luckily, I’ve got it setup to dual boot right now though, so I can work on the system during the day or night, and still boot into my current system to keep my mail flowing and have the blog up and running.
Just with it wouldn’t take so long.
After much hemming and hawing over the past few weeks, I’ve decided that it’s time to get rid of Gentoo on my laptop. All along I knew that keeping a system that was completely user configurable up and running would be a pain. I personally didn’t need that level of user control, but at the time it was one of the best distros out there. Don’t take that the wrong way either… it’s still one of the best out there, just not one of the best for me.
One of the things that led to this decision is the problem with keeping the system updated. Portage is a great package management system, and having the ability to run one command to update the system is great. However, I’ve found that it’s almost never that easy. Every time I’ve upgraded my server, something happened to crash it. Either a package failed to install, a configuration file needed to be reconfigured or was simply moved to a different location messing up my other configuration files, a program was buggy for some reason, or it installed the package older than the one I had already configured.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that I need to make sure that Portage is doing it’s job and not just let it’s business, but having to make sure every little thing was working the way it should just got to be too stressful and time consuming. Because of this my server is in dire need of an update. I’ve been putting it off for months just so I didn’t have to deal with downtime and lost information.
So… that being said, I’ve decided to switch to Ubuntu on my desktop to see how it works and if it’s stable enough for my server environment. So far, I really like what I see! Everything works so nicely on it. I can remove and reinstall my mouse and still have it work, USB Flashdrives work without any problems. The Synaptic package manager seems to keep everything pretty clean.
I want to spend time working with my operating system, not on my operating system, this is why I’ve chosen to switch.
Unfortunately, as we see so often, big corporations can still force the little man to do what they want when they have the money. Here is a clear cut example:
As many of you know I’ve been using Gaim for quite some time now. Gaim is a multi client instant messenger. Basically it allows me to chat with people on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, and others all from one program instead of having to open a program for each network.
In the beginning the project was called GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger. Naturally AOL had a fit because their name was in the program name. So the developers changed the name to Gaim and AOL was satisfied for a while. When they trademarked AIM, they threw a fit again.
Well… it seems that their big money has finally forced the little man to do what they want yet again. Gaim will officially be known as Pidgin from here on out. This is a sad day for the open source community.
You can read more here: http://www.pidgin.im/index.php?id=177
