The sumbitches are at it agin', mother. Comment spam is infecting both
my blog and my wife's. So far a relatively small number of
keywords -- poker, Texas, debt -- is sufficient to keep 'em away from
where Google can see 'em. Well, that and OCD-like running of SELECT
statements in MySQL. But the fuckers are gonna be the death of me, or
at least blog comments. Although maybe some sort of SURBL plugin
for URLs in the post...that'd be cool. Someone must have something
like that already.
Not that I notice a whole lot of comments, anyhow, at least away
from the Slashdot side of things...although I do notice that
I've made it onto somebody's blogroll. How'd that happen?
In other news: I finally decided what to do about new computers: buy a
new Shuttle Sk43G, Sempron processor, and make that my web server;
then, make my current webserver (older Compaq P3-500 desktop machine)
my desktop and firewall: lots of room for ethernet cards, tape drives
and whatnot.
I agree, it's a little silly that the more powerful box becomes the
horribly underutilized server, but such is life. If there was a
comparably cheap shuttle that came with two onboard ethernet
interfaces, I'd be buying that instead.
So dive right in, right? I got the new box home last night, assembled
it and booted w/o problems. It took little effort to move the hard
drive from the web server and put it in the new, tiny box; sure, I had
to recompile the kernel (8 minutes! eat that, P90!) to get the right
drivers in, but nothing big. Until, that is, it froze. Hard. And only
a few minutes after booting. If I ran top and set it to update
continuously, I could get to freeze within seconds.
Some fiddling with Grub (boot loader of the GODS, man) showed that the
problem seemed to go away if I went with the original Slackware stock
2.4.20 kernel instead of the 2.6.7 kernel I'd last compiled. (I'm a
packrat, and that includes keeping every kernel compiled on this
damned thing, Just In Case, because You Never Know.) We've got one of
these boxes at work with an Athlon XP and it works fine; admittedly,
it's not doing much, but neither is my web server. (Ba-zing!)
God only knows what's going on there, but it didn't last: I left it on
overnight to see if it'd keep going, and sure enough it froze again
around 10pm. I put the HD back in the P3 and left it. I'm going to see
Wilco tonight (Whoo! WilCO! WHOO!), so this'll take a back seat to
some serious RAWK. Except I'll probably be speculating about crappy
memory or badly applied heatsink paste the whole time. No. No, I
won't. It's Wilco.
Actually, I'm thinking I may have to upgrade the BIOS in order to get
it to work properly with the Sempron; originally it was detected as a
900MHz Athlon, and I had to tweak the bus speed and whatnot to get it
to run at 1.5GHz. (Interestingly, this seemed to have no effect
whatsoever on how quickly it would crash, compared to the difference
the different kernel version made.) (God, that's an awful
sentence. I'm sorry, everyone.)
Anyhow, there's probably lots wrong with the settings; I never really
wanted to learn about memory spacings and CPU voltages and I don't
know what-all.
In other other news, I mentioned that I moved last week, but I
didn't mention that I came back to two, count 'em TWO dead
computers. (Before you ask: Support contracts are for the weak, and I
suspect I'm about to get very weak.) One was a Linux box whose hard
drive gave up the ghost. Stupid IDE hard drives in a dusty, hot
environment anyway! But the other was was an old Duron whose
motherboard's capacitors yearned to be one with the cosmos (ie, they
blew up real good). That was running Windows, so the whole
let's-just-throw-the-hard-drive-into-another-box-and-see-if-it-boots
thing was good for a very, very bitter laugh but little else.
Instead, I reinstalled not only Windows but Cygwin, too. That proved
to be harder; we use Cygwin to compile very particular things that
depend on version 2.2 of Python. Version 2.3 makes things cry. And no
matter how much you tell the Cygwin installer that you don't want to
upgrade Python, it goes ahead and does so anyway like some hyperactive
sugar-fueled kid who's certain he knows how to fix things.
After far too much experimentation, I did what I should have done in
the first place: I found an old archive of Cygwin, with the right
version of Python, and I mirrored it. One gigantic, nine-hour long
sucking sound later, and I had a local copy to point the Cygwin
installer at. Thank god.
Finally, just got in the first 19" LCD monitor at work. This was, of
course, two weeks after assuring someone that they were too expensive
to get past the boss. My bad. I'm going to get a lot of mean looks, I
think. But then, if I was a people person, why would I have become a
sysadmin?
Recommendation of the Day: Vicious Battle Rap, by DJ Format and
Abdominal. Bow down, baby.
