Posted By Ian on Feb 27, 2004 | 0 comments

     A whole lot of you have said to me “Hey Ian! What’s going on? We haven’t seen any news in a whole long while.” Actually, that’s not true, no one has said exactly that.

     I’ve been working on the following… Some guy “hacked” into one of my machines so I was talking to lawyers all week trying to figure out if it’s worth pursueing. He only deleted some mail, and his provider was being less than helpful with any information, so it would have drawn out in court for months. Not worth the time. Technically he didn’t hack in either, he just discovered how painfully simple the email account passwords were on some accounts. It still doesn’t excuse it; if I leave my front door open, but you come into my kitchen and eat my mayonaise, you’re still trespassing.

     Then the next week, I was busy working to recover all the lost time from that fancy debockal. Not much news, just busy busy.

     Then this week I was moving all of the company’s sites and mail to our own, much more powerful server. So we get the added bonus of segregation and more speed from the hosting customers. I installed the latest update of FreeBSD 5.2.1 on that system. I figured it’s a new implementation and that strand of FreeBSD hasn’t had that many problems on this other box that I’m running it on, so I might as well. So I get the box all set up, installed the latest versions of perl 5.8.2, apache 2.0.48, PHP 4.3.4, OpenSSL 0.9.7c, and Zend Optimizer 2.5.0. What a disaster. Once everything was running the apache child processes, when they should have been dieing off, wouldn’t. They just kept on staying there, but sucessfully starting new ones. So the box would bog itself down to a grinding halt. I needed a battle plan and quick, so I set up another hard disk with FreeBSD 4.9 on it and all the same versions of everything. Everything except Zend worked. I had to install Zend Optimizer 2.1.0b to make that work. All is well now, but it took three days working almost 18 hours a day to get to that point.

     Canada Blooms is on next week. If anyone wants tickets, I can get them at the member discount rate of $10 a piece. Considering it’s $18 at the door for an adult, if you’re going to go, you might as well get a discount. I’ll be going down on Saturday to sign autographs and accepting charitable financial donations for my retirement. See you there!