Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

September 30: DSPsrv went back to the datacentre today, so it should be back up and running soon.

September 25: I feel like I'm the last person still using kindle.amazon.com; this evening, Twitter integration appears to be broken. I filed a bug report some time in the last year or two for an issue tracking a particular book I'd read that seems like it just got filed in the bit bucket - all I got was some plámás for my efforts. The site has never really seemed to be more than a half-baked experiment that didn't get past public alpha, and probably all effort is directed into GoodReads at this point. Oh well.
September 20: Took a spin down to the Oktoberfest. Any beer you want as long as it's Erdinger, and an array of sugary and fatty food to go with it. Topped with a delicious sprinkling of RAIN RAIN RAIN.

September 19: Sent out notifications to people who might have off-server addresses signed up to lists on the DSPsrv. Planning on getting this all back on line shortly.

Upgraded the Server app on the Mac Mini, which promptly disabled the WSGI apps I'd set up. Last time this happened it was because there was some incompatibility; this time it seems like Apple just decided they knew better than I did what I actually wanted running, since I was able to switch the apps back on again without making any changes. Fine, just would have been better if I hadn't had to do that at all.

Oh yeah. 10 years ago today was the start of my current job.

September 7: I thought the DSPsrv mailman setup was broken, but it turns out I'd just hit a moderated list and failed to notice the moderation message in the logs. So all things considered I think it's about time I pinged my tech contact to see about getting this server back on the Internet.
September 6: The Theory of Everything was an interesting enough trawl through the non-technical life of Stephen Hawking, but did little with the technical side. Which is fair enough, other than that that's what he's famous for.

September 5: Flinging caution to the wind and doing apt-get dist-upgrade while I have the server somewhere that I can reach it when I inevitably cock it up.

The only sticky thing so far has been the Apache install, which seemed to have some stickiness to Apache 2.2. A bit of LART application fixed that.

Then roundcube was unhappy...

...and then /usr filled up...

And eventually things got upgraded. Apache was the most problematic since it looks like various things had been hacked around to get it into its current state, and dpkg wasn't too happy with cleaning them up. I need to validate at this point that nothing has been broken by the upgrade (has happened, will happen).

And then there's, "Oh. So THIS is systemd."

Much cleaning and a crash or two later, and I'm happy that most of the server still works; still picking out a few niggly things. Looks like my hopes of having remote hardware management available are dead beyond something that will poke the disk controller every 15 minutes.

Right, nearly there. I've temporarily set up routing for email to go via my ISP, which led me to discover that the NS records were pointing at the offline server; fixed that (will flip them back at a later date) and hopefully the next step is to email as many people I have contact details for to fill them in on what happens now.

Good grief, Q3 again.