This is how you get a decent crop dusting job done when you live in the hills of southern Indiana. :-) Planes don’t cut it!

Crop dusting with a chopper

Since the Jeep didn’t take long to fix today, I used the rest of daylight to rewire the garage and add some overhead lighting so I can work at night. Prior to today, my worthless garage had zero overhead lighting, so this is a huge improvement! I can’t wait to break in the new lighting this week while I work on the Jeep at night.

After thinking about getting a second Jeep for parts, I think that I will simply fix up the current Jeep in my garage, and save up for a nice tow vehicle. I should be able to get doors with manual windows for the Cherokee, which sound better than repairing/replacing the current doors which have power windows and locks. The less wiring, the better off I’ll be.

These folks took a year to sort through all that raw footage, and produce an extremely excellent video!

Tonight, I finally sat down and found out how to take the data from the dual-layer DVD download and burn it to a DVD+RDL disc on my Mac Mini. Basically, I saved the VIDEO_TS folder in another folder on my desktop called “NIN”. From a terminal I ran these commands:

cd Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -udf \
-udf-version 1.02 -default-volume-name \
"AVOTT_THE_GIFT" -o "AVOTT_THE_GIFT.iso" "NIN"

(Thanks to this page which helped me figure out what I needed to do to create the ISO successfully!)

This resulted in an ISO file on my desktop, which I was able to drag into Disk Utility on the Mac, and then burn to the dual-layer DVD. The DVD then played in the software DVD player on the Mac, and also in my fairly new LG DVD player upstairs. The 5.1 surround sound is incredible, and the video looks awesome!

If you are a fan of NIN, and didn’t get to see the tour in person, this is one video you will not want to miss!

Tomorrow I am going to attempt to set up a sandbox for our dev environment at the office on a Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) workstation. This should speed up things in IDEs and our revision control system, and make all the developers happy!

Looking forward to warmer weather. I hope to get a decent antenna mounted above my roof line this spring, so I can get better reception on the hdHomeRun for MythTV.

Tweaked a few more Apache settings, and scored decent on WebPageTest.org’s site. Done for now!

Interview at www.Cleveland.com

I figured this was relevant since I preserved an older interview on this site a while back. Enjoy!

That’s a little late, but this is the first blog post for 2010 here on ServerUnderground. Not much has been going on, other than watching the snow fall, and waiting for warmer weather so I can work on the Jeep.

I did break down and purchase a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, so I could play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I now have a modern Windows workstation, the Mac Mini (upgraded, of course), and some Linux workstations/servers in the basement lair to keep me company. I have been tempted to sell of as many PCs as possible in order to raise funds for Jeep parts, but so far I’ve resisted the urge.

Work is going well, and the rollout of Snow Leopard is in progress! I recently completed an upgrade to Snow Leopard Server on our in-office Xserves, which also consolidated a lot of services onto one new Xserve, including email services. THAT was a load of fun, but managed to go smoother than other aspects of the upgrade/migration. Working with NetBoot/NetInstall/NetRestore images has been interesting, and will enable me to more quickly recover a Mac workstation/laptop in the future.

Tore apart an out of contract Google box today, and recut the drives for a fresh installation of CentOS 5.4.

The past few months have been busy on the infrastructure side of things at work. We are preparing for 100Mbit/s fiber service! Cool things are in store for everyone at the office once that fiber lights up.

As for the Jeep, it’s been driving better and better every time I take it out. The front-end does need some work (steering and suspension rebuild), the right turn signal doesn’t work yet, and I need to replace the gas tank (or fix whatever’s causing the fuel to leak out when it’s full). The power steering is shot, so that will be either a rebuild or replacement for the power steering pump (leaks fluid). All that said, 4×4 works great, and I’m looking forward to getting everything fixed up so I can blow even more money on new tires and rims this summer!

Once the Jeep is fixed up and ready for daily driving duties, the Prelude will go under the knife to fix some issues in the engine bay. Namely, I need to replace the engine/transmission mounts, replace the clutch and fix the hydraulic clutch system in general (leaks, low pressure). The radiator has a small leak right at the top, so that will need to be repaired/replaced, as well as some gaskets on the top end of the engine that seem to leak a tiny bit of oil.

Work on the site tonight consisted of the reinstatement of Google AdSense, some updates to plugins, and adding Google Analytics. I also added a language translator, so hopefully some of the more useful technical things I post could be more useful to those of you who do not speak/read English. :-)

That will about wrap it up. Until next time!

Two days after I purchased the Jeep, I had it titled, plated, and insured. I also had my first “off-road” experience! Stock lug nuts don’t work with aluminum aftermarket rims, and I lost the left rear tire going about 60mph down a busy two-lane stretch of road. I managed to get the Jeep into the ditch without hitting anyone, and my tire decided to go up the road another 1/4 of a mile. No one was hurt, no property damage done, and I only dented the rear bumper a bit when I stopped up against a tree.

The tire was located and put back on the vehicle, and I drove the Jeep home. During the accident, the metal brake line that runs to the rear brakes developed a pin-hole leak. I am in the process of replacing the rotted lines that run from the proportioning valve to each of the rear wheel cylinders.

One link that I have found in my quest for more information about the stock brakes on my Cherokee is this:

Tech Article at www.lunghd.com

I searched high and low for info on the proportioning valve, and couldn’t make sense of where everything was supposed to go until I found this page. Thank goodness for the internet!

Once I figure out a way to easily host some photos off of my server, I’ll toss a gallery online and fill it with Jeep pics!

Mr. Watterson, if you ever read this, thank you for sharing your thoughts and beliefs through your comics.

(If there are any legal issues with posting this speech online, please contact me via my published information here.)

Speech by Bill Watterson
Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED

Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I’m walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t have my schedule memorized, and I’m not sure which classes I’m taking, or where exactly I’m supposed to be going.

As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don’t have my box key, and in fact, I can’t remember what my box number is. I’m certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can’t get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, “How many more years until I graduate? …Wait, didn’t I graduate already?? How old AM I?” Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you’re going or what you’re doing.

I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn’t give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I’m emboldened by the fact that I can’t remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won’t remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn’t finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn’t much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn’t seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don’t get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that’s what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.

You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by: absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

For me, it’s been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I’ve been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

So, what’s it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don’t recommend it.

I don’t look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I’d have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it’s too late.

Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I’d drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.

Boy, was I smug.

As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I’d been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn’t give refunds.

Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn’t have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips.

For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job.

A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.

It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.

It’s funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that’s what it means to be in an ivory tower.

Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli sci books that I’d somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don’t care about what you’re doing, and the only reason you’re there is to pay the bills.

Thoreau said,

“the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

That’s one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.

When it seemed I would be writing about “Midnite Madness Sale-abrations” for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.

I tell you all this because it’s worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It’s a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you’ll probably take a few.

I still haven’t drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.

Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn’t in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.

Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn’t what I caught. I’ve wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I’d be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.

To make a business decision, you don’t need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.

As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.

The so-called “opportunity” I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I’d need.

What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we’ve been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.

Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime.

But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.

I think you’ll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.

With luck, you’ve also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you’d never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you’ll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed.

I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.

Bill Watterson

A configuration issue prevented emails from reaching me regarding comments, so that should also work now. Sorry about that folks! I didn’t realize people were signing up on the site until tonight when I looked at the users list. :-(

Thanks for tuning in! Until next time!

Thanks, SiliconDust! I really enjoy this piece of hardware, and so far have been impressed with the level of support offered by the company. The forums are informative, firmware updates are fairly frequent, and always make things better (from my perspective, anyways).

The Mac Mini (Intel, first generation) received a nice upgrade to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB internal SATA drive. Makes for improved video editing in iMovie ‘09! I also loaded Snow Leopard, which has been running very smooth on the upgraded hardware. I believe the next purchase will be a 24″ widescreen LCD to replace the 20″ CRT that I am currently using for video.

The Cyanogenmod project came under fire from Google recently, due to the redistribution of some of their non-free/non-open source applications. It sounds like the project has made some headway in resolving the legal issues with Google, and some new code and procedures should be released soon. I do have some interest in all of this, as I run the Cyanogen firmware on my G1!

Zimbra released the 6.0 version of their excellent Zimbra Collaboration Suite recently. I successfully (of course!) updated my own email server from the Open Source 5.0.19 release to the Open Source 6.0.1 release this evening. Very smooth upgrade, thanks to the fine work of everyone at Zimbra!

Fall is here, and that means temps in the basement lair will soon drop enough that I can fire up some more hardware. Winter projects are just around the corner!

Everything doesn’t always work perfect in the experimental tree, but the fact that everything is open (and rooted, if you plan on running any non-official firmware) means I now have some very useful applications available to me that normal G1 users can’t even run. This is what I have been waiting for in a cell phone for a LONG time.

Long live Google Android! ;-)

If you’d like to contact me by phone, the info is on the about page, or you can try using the little Flash widget Google has provided below:

The desktop environment is provided by KDE 4.2, and I have to say, it’s come a long way since I’ve last used KDE (3.x days).  A very slick interface indeed.

My thanks goes out to the Slackware Linux team for putting together such a great Linux distribution!  Now to play with all the new toys added to Slackware since I last used it!  :-)

Wow, night and day difference as far as the initial configuration goes!  I’m now connected to the IPv6 world via Hurricane Electric, and all appears right in the world again.

Sixxs.net still hasn’t fixed the issue, and it’s been almost a week.  I’m not the only one affected by the issue either, so it’s quite baffling that they would let this issue rot in public view like this.

I’ve updated DNS, so http://ipv6.serverunderground.net/ should be online again in an hour or so for the rest of the ‘net.

The goal is to create some kind of interactive site for IPv6 visitors.  For now, I’m going to have a very basic web server dishing out a CentOS 5.3 mirror.  I’ll have to find a few other things to mirror that might be useful in IPv6 land as well.

So, if have IPv6 connectivity, http://ipv6.serverunderground.net should work for you now!

So, not only do we have Slackware Linux for 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x86, we also have official support for the IBM S/390 platform and now ARM!

Hats off to Stuart Winter for all his work putting together the required bits for ARM, and to the Slackware team for giving us such a great platform to work from.

What did I take away from this experience?  I feel Velocity Conference really serves a need in the community to bring folks with like goals together to learn from one another.  The quality of the content in each presentation was really outstanding, and better than I would have imagined.  This wasn’t just some PR person from each of the companies, but a real live developer or infrastructure person who shared his or her thoughts on the subject matter at hand.  Yeah, we had some “ad” content from obvious PR folks, but this was not the bulk or focus of the talks.

As for what I learned, it’s that there’s always someone out there with a similar set of problems and experiences.  I was happy to hear that the company I work for does a lot of things the right way, or is lined up with how a proven successful company plans to proceed in the future.  We also do a few things the wrong way, or in lesser quantities than we really should.  The subject matter really made an impact regarding how I will approach certain situations, and has lit a fire under me to get some things rolling for our development and infrastructure folks.

I was not expecting the talks to be as in depth as some pertaining to the operations side of a company.  This was driven home by more than one speaker emphasizing the same points over and over.  Without change control management, a company cannot scale internally, let alone the application being developed.  I believe this speaks for itself.

Another side of the talks that was a little lighter was regarding browsers and web applications.  The desire for IE6 to go away forever was evident in more than one talk, and the graphs for browser performance only made this point all the more clear.  One quote presented in a slide said, “We’ve upped our standards, up yours”, by Joe Clark.  I took this to mean, “You can’t wait for the users to follow you, or you’ll be stuck with their level of technology forever.”

Some people don’t know what “cloud” computing is to this day, and I was really saddened by this during a couple of the talks.  If you have piles of servers in a data center, it’s not a “cloud”.  If you sell hardware, you aren’t selling it for use in a “cloud”.  Cloud computing is strictly the virtual infrastructure one can lease through an organization that manages all aspects of the hardware and networking for you.  Xen instances that can be fired up and destroyed with the click of a mouse is cloud computing.

Cloud computing is also about extending infrastructure, not replacing it.  Everyone who uses cloud services has at least one datacenter somewhere, acting as a mothership for the processes and data that get tossed into the cloud when capacity is needed.

Velocity 2009 was a great experience, and I look forward to next year’s event!

Neat stuff!

I’m currently trying to get Bittorrent up and running so I can stress this connection a little.  After that, it’s going to be a whole lot of fun figuring out what to do next.  :-)

So far, I like pfSense better than both IPCop and Untangle. Time will tell!

With the rising temps, and HUMIDITY (gack), I’ve upped the ante on my “environmental systems” (a term I use loosely), and installed a digital timer for the humidifier. It’s not a good idea to run the thing 24×7, and if I set it to a specific humidity level, it kicks on and off rapidly, which is also not good for the unit. The digital timer is configured to run for five hours, then shut the unit down for an hour, and repeat the cycle.

On the connectivity side, things are going to heat up now that Comcast has announced IPv6 for residential customers starting in 2010! I hope I can get on that bandwagon early as a business customer. There may be a call to Comcast Business services in my future to discuss such matters. :-)

Jacking around with Boot Camp on the work laptop, and thinking about trying Mythbuntu on the Mac Mini. Might turn out well!

NetBSD folks are still poking at the SPARC SMP issues.  I have a feeling I should just dump the SPARC systems and move on at this point.  Cool hardware is only cool if you can actually use it.  Otherwise, it should be put in a museum.

Never did get the IPv6 stuff going, as I was going to make a private network of SPARC hardware to run all of my IPv6 applications.

In other news, I think I found the problem with my mail server.  After swapping some RAM around, I have not seen a lockup all last week.  That’s a good thing!  I’ll post video of me burning the bad DIMM in my fire pit at some point this summer.

In NetBSD news, one of the mailing list folks worked on the SMP problem for 32-bit SPARC systems, and was able to boot further than before.  I’ll have to see if this code is in -current, and try it out on my SPARCStation 20 this week.

Summer is getting closer, and that means keeping an eye on the environmentals in the basement lair more closely.  The dehumidifer is set up, and on standby.  :-)

This week I’ll be doing a software upgrade to all of the Zimbra servers I maintain.  Should be uneventful!

Once everyone was tired and back inside the house, I proceeded to the lair to download the newly aquired data into the Mac Mini.  iPhoto and iMovie ‘09 worked so well, I ended up converting a lot of video and dumped a ton of photos that have been lying around for almost half a year into Facebook.

Unfortunately, the 120GB drive that came with the Mac Mini is approaching its capacity with all the video I’ve been importing lately.  It will soon be time to crack open the case, and replace the hard drive and upgrade the RAM to something that will render this machine faster and more capable in the video rendering department.

Speaking of the cloud, I was contacted today by a NetBSD kernel maintainer for the SPARC port, and informed that I should look at loading their -current tree onto the machine which could benefit from SMP support.  Might be an interesting project for later this week.

If anyone out there is an expert at NetBSD 5.0 on sun4c/sun4m/sun4u hardware, please leave a comment!

I hope to get this system (and the other Sun boxen) running, as I need a testbed of machines for my IPv6 project at home.  I was approved for a Sixxs.net account recently, and need to get a few things in order before I can proceed with that project, namely having machines to talk and provide services over IPv6.

The only other news to report is all of my network switches are full of active machines.  Time for larger switches!  :-)

Also on the agenda is IPCop, and its proper implementation in the SOHO arena.

1. Download the version of Zimbra required for the OS AFTER it has been updated (Zimbra for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS).  This is a decent sized file, so it makes sense to have this before you start upgrading.  Keep this in a safe place, and don’t get it mixed up with any other tarballs for Zimbra on the server.
2. BACK UP YOUR DATA (preferrably to another machine or external hard drive) then shut down Zimbra completely by executing “/etc/init.d/zimbra stop”.
3. Move /opt/zimbra to something like /opt/PREUPGRADE-zimbra so it is out of the way.
4. Uninstall Zimbra from the same source directory you did the install by typing “./install.sh -u”.  If you didn’t keep the tarball used to do the last update or installation of Zimbra, download it and unpack it on your server somewhere.  Verify it is the EXACT same version and platform you had running in production (ie Zimbra for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS).  This will not remove your /opt/PREUPGRADE-zimbra directory.
5. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace “dapper” with “hardy” everywhere in the file.  If you use vim, you can just type (everything inside the quotes) “:%s/dapper/hardy/g” and press ENTER to modify the file quickly.
6. Next, run “apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade”.  This can take a while to download an apply the packages.  You’ll need to stick around, as it will ask you if you wish to replace certain config files with the default files from the new packages.  This is something you will have to decide if you have made modifications to your system previously.
7. If a package fails to download, just run the “apt-get dist-upgrade” again.  Make sure your upgrade is 100% successful before proceeding!
8. Reboot the system.
9. Log back in, verify everything looks OK.  Once you have verified your disks are still there, everything is mounted, and you still see your /opt/PREUPGRADE-zimbra directory, you may proceed.
10. Unpack the new Zimbra installation tarball, and run the install (“./install.sh”).  You will go through the entire process, just like this is a fresh install for your mail server.
11. Once you have finished the install, stop the Zimbra server (execute “/etc/init.d/zimbra stop”).
12. Move the newly created /opt/zimbra directory to something like /opt/NEW-zimbra.
13. Move the old Zimbra installation directory (ie. /opt/PREUPGRADE-zimbra) to /opt/zimbra.  Verify file ownership is still correct for /opt/zimbra and its contents.
14. Start the old instance of Zimbra (execute “/etc/init.d/zimbra start”).
15. If all goes well, your original installation of Zimbra should fire up!

From what I’ve read on the Zimbra community forums, this is basically the same procedure you would use to upgrade CentOS or most other Linux operating systems compatible with Zimbra, obviously supplying the appropriate commands for the distribution at hand.

Enjoy!

I think this also speaks favorably towards using the framework a distribution provides for file system structure and configuration layouts.  Every domain hosted on this server is configured in a modular way with regards to Apache configs, and apparently I managed to not screw up other aspects of the system by sticking to the supplied user editable conf files.  *pats his own back*

So, here’s to Debian, and another successful major revision upgrade.  Why can’t all Linux distros be this easy?  ;-)

On a related note, NetBSD 5.0 was released today.  I’m currently seeding the amd64, i386, sparc64 and sparc port installation ISOs via Bittorrent.

First impressions with WordPress leave me wondering why I stuck with the old site for so long.  This stuff is easy!  ;-)

As an added bonus, this site is now also utilizing memcached.  The reason for this is so I can play with memcached, and maybe keep the site snappy in the event someone actually links here.  :-)

So, welcome to the grand re-opening of ServerUnderground.com!  Enjoy your stay.