I have oncall looming on the horizon, and as such I should probably be cranking things up a notch this week.  So far that plan has consisted of…  Nothing.  Somebody needs to get out here and entertain me.  I realize those options are a bit limited with the residual snow and all, but surely you can think of something.  Slush-ball fight?  Build a snowman?  Tacos at the new restaurant in Waldo?  C’mon, work with me here.

Wow, not even 9:00 and I have already declared this the best day ever.  I better hurry up and post something before it all comes crashing down.  What do I base this glowing review on?  Well, I got to bed early and slept pretty well last night, so that’s always a good start.  Then, I managed to get out the door on time and caught the early bus.  The bus was remarkably uncrowded, and I didn’t get stuck next to talking-person, crazy-person or even stinky-person.  Needless to say, I was already fairly skipping down the sidewalk on my way to the office after that pleasant ride.  Already brimming with optimism for the day, I walked in the break room and BOTH coffee pots were totally full!  I kid you not, I have never, ever seen that before.  Ever.  Generally, the best case is there is enough in one to fill my cup, and more often than not one is all but empty and the other is covered with baked-on smelly crud because nobody can switch off the burner when it’s empty.  And THEN, if THAT wasn’t enough, guess what happened next??!!!  Well, nothing, that was it.  I try not to get too lofty with my expectations these days.  I’ll tell you what though, if stinky-person doesn’t sit next to me on the way back home, it is ON, I’m going out and partying somewhere.

I am not particularly inclined to recap that weekend.  I am tired, cold, hungry, and I probably need another cup of coffee.  Wah.

I will, however, hit the highlights I suppose.  That shouldn’t take long, as there weren’t many of them.  Friday I stopped by the Brooksider to say “hi” to everybody.  I hung out there for a bit, then Donette came down and got me and we went to Cantina Del Ray for some dinner.  We haven’t been there in a while for whatever reason.  Matter of fact, they had totally new menus since the last time we ate there, with a few new plates in the mix.  Need to get up there more often, it’s always good.

Saturday was sort of a “hunker-down” day I guess.  Too dang cold to do anything.  I watched all the basketball games and that was about it.  We made some fish stew for dinner, which came out rather nicely if I do say so myself.  Have to add that one to the regular rotation.  Easy, tasty and even healthy;  A rare combination.

Sunday the cabin fever started kicking in again, so Martin came down and rescued me.  Donette was at the movies with Susan and Kelly, so Martin and I went and hung out at 75th Street.  We stayed there a good part of the day, watching the football games and plotting next season’s BBQ strategies.  The girls came up after a while, and we headed down to the Brooksider for a bit.  Watched some more football, but it was pretty loud and crowded, so we headed back south and rounded out the evening with some dinner at Waldo Pizza.  MAN that is some good pizza.  All that running around effectively cured my cabin fever, at least until about noon today.

Given the fact that I’ve been snowed in at home the last several evenings, I really don’t have anything to post on here.  However, I’m on such a roll that I feel I should put in something, so I will delight everyone with an update on the status of my latest webserver iteration.  As of last night I finally moved it from “work in progress” status to “ready for production.”

As I’m sure everyone remembers, I recently migrated this site from my long-running NSLU2 onto a Synology DS111.  The trusty NSLU2 certainly served me well, especially given the price, but eventually it proved woefully underpowered.  As a matter of fact there was a dark period in my life where I actually ran everything on my Windows desktop, but we don’t talk about that.  Enter the DS111.  After much research I finally decided on that particular unit as a good compromise on hardware, price-point, and energy usage.  (Some small part of me still wishes I would have opted for the dual-bay DS211, but that nearly doubled the price.)  I was also naively convinced I could set up the entire thing to my liking right out of the box, with no customization required, which would save me a lot of time.  I’ve made that same idealistic statement many times before, and it’s never worked out once.  Within hours of unpacking it and turning it on I had already flashed it with Optware, instantly voiding the warranty but giving me many more “opportunities.”  For the first several months I worked with a mix of the stock features and the Optware packages, but by now it’s entirely running the Optware add-ons.  So, without further ado, I shall regale you with a fascinating synopsis of the finished product.

For a while I ran the stock setup;  Apache webserver with Synology’s flavor of PHP + MySQL.  Honestly this worked fine and I probably could have gotten away with it, but I found myself staring at the system utilization constantly and thinking “It could do better.”  So, my first step was to ditch Apache for Lighttpd, which is what I ran forever on the old NSLU2.  I quickly ran into problems getting it to work like I wanted though, so after another bout of research I settled on nginx.  This proved to be the answer to all life’s problems, with the minor issue of setting up a virtual host.  I only need that function occasionally for phpmyadmin,  so after a half-hearted attempt at wading through nginx’s mostly foreign-language support pages, I settled on using lighttpd for that, and just shutting it back down when I’m finished.  The next hurdle was the quirky Synology SQL package.  I got it all tuned up like I wanted performance-wise, only to find that the server would hang every time I shut it down.  (OK, I didn’t REALLY accidentally turn it off when we were on vacation, I made one final SQL change on the way out the door and it locked up.)  I puzzled over this for a few weeks, and finally ended up moving off their stuff onto Optware flavors of the same, which proved more challenging than I anticipated by quite some stretch.

The final step was some means of preserving all these fascinating changes and updates in case of a system failure.  After monkeying around with the built-in backup, and a few other wildly complicated third-party options, I finally enlisted the help of my fellow “tinkerer” Mike, who is much more skilled in the ways of the Linux Jedi than I.  As it turned out he already had a well-written package of scripts which, with some minor modifications, fit my needs just fabulously and with far less head-scratching than anything else I had tried.  I tested it all extensively last night and it worked just peachy.  So now you can all sleep well at night knowing this site is auto-magically backed up regularly, albeit not to an off-site location.  Speaking of which, I wonder if I could…  NO, NO, I AM DONE WITH IT.

See, I told you not to read this update.