Busy Week
Whenever one computer breaks down in the house, they all seem to breakdown. My primary PC is starting to freeze (I’m thinking it’s the video card). While updating my Mac to 10.5.6, the hard drive crashed. And my primary Web server (CentOS 4 running Apache in a VM) decided it didn’t want to connect to the database any more and therefore stopped servicing up pages. Yuck!
The biggest issue was the web server as I host a couple of websites for friends. Over the last couple of months I’ve been trying to build a new Virtual Machine to host my websites. The old VM was a server that I P2V’ed last year running CentOS 4. That server got to a point where I could no longer do security or application updates so that server was very vulnerable. It was also 40 GB in size which honestly it didn’t need to be. As I mentioned, for the last couple of months I have been building and testing a new web server based on the latest versions of LAMP (Linux - CentOS 5, Apache - 2.23, MySQL - 5.0.43, PHP). For the most part I had everything working so when the old server decided to quit, it was a fairly seamless process (although a bit time consuming) to move over the different websites and import the databases into MySQL. It did take me another day to properly configure Apache to serve out the different websites. The last major project is migrate the Gallery2 portion of this website that hosts my picture gallery. So as of last week, we are on a new, updated server. That’s one thing down. Longer term I would like to rebuild the physical server that VMWare sits on as the OS itself has become a bit flaky.
This past weekend I started upgrading my Mac so that I could take advantage of the latest version of iLife. Just as I was finishing the upgrade to 10.5.6, my hard drive crashed. Off to Memory Express I went to get a 1TB SATA drive and because it was so cheap, another 2 GB of RAM. The last time I built this machine, it literally took weeks to get everything working correctly. This time by end of the evening I had upgraded the machine to 10.5.6 and the only thing that was not working was Quartz Extreme. Hopefully I can find the combination of drivers to get this going soon. I have to say that with the new hard drive and more memory this machine feels quite a more snappy. It kind of makes me want to put in a Solid State Drive and see how much faster things work.
So with that done, that only leaves my primary PC. I’m hoping to get another video card and pray that’s what’s causing the issue.
As much as this stuff can be a pain in the butt, it does feel good when I get it working.