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.

The ol’ bus is starting to wear on me a bit, and it’s only mid-January.  Bad sign.  Getting home last night was a real adventure.  I showed up at the bus stop right on time, and noted on their fancy, supposedly GPS-driven sign that the bus was also right on schedule.  Excellent.  The sign changed to “arriving” as always.  And then it stayed that way for about five minutes.  Pretty soon it changed from “arriving” to “delayed,” and then the next bus showed up on the board as ten minutes out.  Huh, that was weird, did I see that right?  A quick conference among the other commuters confirmed that yes, our bus had fallen into some kind of abyss.  So we watched the next one count down, and then promise it was “arriving.”  Some time later it too went to “delayed.”  This pattern continued over and over, and the ever-growing crowd was having quite a laugh about our fair city and their “services.”  Over an hour later, the now very, very large crowd was morphing into more of an angry mob, and much of the humor had left the situation.  I wasn’t really dressed for standing around in a snowstorm, and the cold was getting quite uncomfortable.  (Yes dear, you can say “I told you so” if you like.)  I was considering taking refuge at the Flying Saucer or maybe the Phoenix, but although that might have been a good temporary solution it still wouldn’t get me home.  I noticed the northbound bus passing by regularly, so I finally bailed out and jumped on one of them, just to get warm if nothing else.  We wound through downtown and I got off at 11th & Grand, and queued up for the southbound again.  After standing there for quite a while, finally a Plaza-bound bus showed up.  Not really my route, but I wasn’t in a spot to complain.  My “theory” was that the buses were not making it up the big hill on 11th street, and were bypassing the stop I had been standing at on Wyandotte.  Well, this guy chugged right along with no problems at all, and we picked what remained of the crowd at the stop I was originally at.  So where the heck were all the other buses?  What happened to all the ones that had passed by going north?  (They turn around at the City Market and come back south.)  Who knows, it’s still a mystery.  I emailed them a pleasant inquiry, which I fully expect to be ignored.  Getting on the bus proved to be just the first step though;  Turned out traffic on Main was at a dead stand-still and there was no place to go anyway.  Hey, at least it was warm.  I made it as far as 42cnd Street, then I bailed out and Donette came and got me.  The trusty SUV got along just fine.

This morning started off much smoother, and my “regular” bus showed up right on time.  Unfortunately it only made it as far as the Plaza, where it broke down.  Back out into the cold to wait again.  Maybe it’s time to buy a Scooter Skirt and start driving myself to work.

Wow, we had quite the adventure yesterday.  We got home from work to find the cable TV was out!  (Hence the extended outage of this website yesterday.)  I called them and they had a recording that said it would be back on by 6:00.  When it still wasn’t on at 7:00 I called again and the recording had been updated to say 10:00.  At 10:30 it still wasn’t on, so I went to bed with no idea what was going on in the outside world.  Imagine, no TV, no Internet, no streaming movies…  It was like living in the wilderness.  Luckily I had video games and DVD’s to fall back on, or I might have been forced to go take refuge at the Brooksider, or maybe even the library.

OK I’m about wintered out.  I think I weathered it in reasonably good spirits, but now I am done.  Time to move on to Spring.

I probably didn’t spend my day off in the most productive fashion, but I didn’t totally waste it either.  The better part of my morning was spent cipherin’ on all the videos I took in Hawaii, in an attempt to edit them into something watchable.  I bought a copy of Roxio Creator 2009 several years ago (as evidenced by the version name) but I’ve never really gotten around to using it.  I have often fired it up, but when it comes up with that overwhelming list of options I just shake my head and close it.  After much trial and error though (and no reading of the directions, naturally) I finally managed to merge several clips into one 5 minute video.  I linked to it my post yesterday if you’d like to see it.  That isn’t necessarily the best video selections out of all I took, but it served a purpose for an “experiment.”  After I finally finished that little project, I caught the bus down to the Brooksider to watch some Missouri basketball.  It was predictably crowded, but not too bad.  I stayed for the entire game, which was quite entertaining.  I gave consideration to sticking around for the late KU game, but when “those people” started filtering in I quickly realized it would be better watched at home.

I have a day off again, whoopie.  No such thing as too many days off.  How I shall spend it remains to be seen.  I haven’t ruled out heading to the Brooksider and watching the basketball games this afternoon.  Anybody in for that?  Anyone, anyone?

That was a reasonably entertaining weekend;  Much more so than I had anticipated, that’s for sure.  Given our lingering fiscal crisis I had fully expected to spend my time sitting in front of the TV.  Donette’s nephew Jeremy was in town though, so we met him down at the Brooksider Friday night.  And I do mean Friday “night“;  We didn’t even head down there until <gasp> 6:30.  Stayed pretty late for us too.  Matter of fact it was so late that after we left we couldn’t find any dinner, everywhere was closed.  So, we headed back home and dug through the cabinets.  The pantry is pretty bare, as we still haven’t re-stocked from our recent vacation, but we did manage to find a dusty can of Skyline Chili in the back of a cabinet.  Yummy.

Saturday Martin gave me a call, apparently suffering from the winter boredom syndrome as much as myself.  He suggested spending the day stirring a pot of gumbo, which sounded as good as anything else I had planned.  So, I trekked up to the Northlands, and that indeed is how we spent our day.  I took my propane cooker up there and we set up in the garage, which was tolerably warm.  As for the gumbo, it came out pretty well.  At least I guess it did, I left it all there.  It was too hot and too huge to deal with that night so we decided to just portion it out later.  It had taken on a life of it’s own by the time we finished randomly adding stuff.  I’m estimating the final amount at 5 gallons.  I have no idea what the two of us are going to do with that much gumbo but we’ll figure something out.

Sunday I headed up to Mom’s for some “chores.”  Sheesh, I ran through two week’s worth of gasoline between the North & South trips this weekend.  I will admit I haven’t been that direction in a while though, guess I was due.  She had all kinds of difficult home maintenance items lined up waiting for me, like changing the light bulb in the kitchen.  Oh, sure, that sounds funny until I mention it took me three times before I got it right.  It was a special light bulb, see.  My handy-man skills are kind of “special” too, that might have contributed to the difficulties.  I stayed up there for a few hours, then headed back home and watched the 3:30 football game.  I wasn’t particularly interested in the outcome, but it provided a means to kill the rest of the afternoon.  For my evening diversion I watched “Murder in the First“, which wasn’t too bad.  Can’t go wrong with Kevin Bacon, as a rule.

Edit – Spent my morning trying to figure out my video editing software, with moderate success.  Now I need to figure out how to get it on here.