Sorry for the interrupt in the program. (No, I’m not coding my web page in Assembler. The pun doesn’t work; sorry.) Anyway, philisha.net is back and better than ever. Well, it’s better than it was earlier today, that is.

The gory details: Apache was freaking out on most my pages and segfaulting without giving any indication why. It was awful. I did what I could, but I was having problems, and I was in over my head. (Penguinomicon, my server, was running FreeBSD, (the name is quite ironic) and I’m really much more familiar with Linux.) In the end I decided it was time to retire my good old Penguinomicon.

my server
it served me well

Farewell!

Penguinomicon began life as an eMachines desktop in the offices of Rancho Mar Realty. When its power supply failed, it was passed on to me and became my primary desktop after my Power Mac G3 Bahamut died. That was in August 2003. I was tinker-happy, so I ran it without a case. It just sat there with its components next to each other collecting dust. In retrospect, “because I was tinker-happy” doesn’t seem like a good enough reason for doing something like that…. Ah well, it was free.

In July 2004 I moved off Biola campus and got a real connection to the Internet, so I decided to host philisha.net from Penguinomicon. I also bought for the first (and only, as of yet) time in my life, a new computer to use as my main desktop. I wanted to try out FreeBSD, so I replaced the Debian GNU/Linux installation on Penguinomicon with FreeBSD and migrated my site from Jacob, Biola’s academic server, to my home.

Fast forward to yesterday and the problems I mentioned above. Today I got a new (er–”new”) machine named thoth and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it to replace Penguinomicon. It’s got twice the disk space, and is a bit faster as well. (I’m learning Rails without FastCGI, so the CPU increase is important.) It’s not that I don’t like FreeBSD, it’s just that at this point I don’t have the time to maintain two very different systems. FreeBSD has a lot of strengths, but the fact that I know Debian backwards and forwards kind of clinches this one.

So after PHP5 finishes compiling on thoth, I’ll be back to where I was on penguinomicon. (Storing all the files on an NFS share from my desktop helped speed up the transition.) I would have liked to keep penguinomicon around, but I just set up thoth in less time than I spent trying to isolate the problem on penguinomicon. There you have it.

Now that I included the option to hide tech entries, I feel a lot more free to blog about things that would be terribly dull to the random viewer. Don’t like this post? Fine, you don’t have to see it! Perfect.