I'm sitting in the IHOP in Stillwater. It's been a long time. Amazingly, I still know one person that works here, Ali one of the Assistant Managers. Unfortunately, he's not here tonight, otherwise I'd say hi and see if he remembers me.

I spent an hour or so earlier at The Third Place with Bryan. I talk to him online every once in awhile, but it was the first time I'd seen him in person in 3 years. it was just like old times, both of us pretty much braindead from working too much on what we do.

It annoyed me earlier though that the wireless access at The Third Place wouldn't work for me. I could see it. It showed I could get a strong signal, but it wouldnt' connect.

Getting ready to head back to Oklahoma City shortly. It's amazing how many old memories I'd forgotten that this town brings up every time I'm here. I'm tempted every time to delve into those past memories and remember events long forgotten. I guess spending 3 of the more formative years of your life in a place can do that to you.

I finally tested the cyrus2mbox.pl script on some real data in a production environment. The only limitation it seems to have is that you need to add it to the end up an existing inbox (let it receive at least one email first) or it will overwrite the data.

I finally figured out my problem. After 3 days, i discovered that there was a problem with my quota for this site's account. When I created a test site under test.fenux.net it was still using this site's account, so it was subject to the same issue. Totally bizarre. I elimanted all quotas for that account and the problem went away.

Every time I try to install PostNuke on a fresh site, I end up with blank config.php and .htaccess files. If I manually fill them in, I end up with a failure to load on both Xanthia and pnRender. It's totally bizarre. I haven't been able to find anything quite like it searching through google.

I think I may go insane over this.

I was working on this site yesterday and wanted the modify the template for News Articles (what shows up when you click "read more"). Every time I tried to modify any of the templates though, it failed miserably. All I would get is blank html for that portion of the site. At one point, my whole site failed and I had to restore from backup to get it to display again.

I'm fairly certain it has something to do with the move to the new server, but after several hours of work on it, I'm still unable to determine what the problem is. Right now, I'm setting up a PostNuke site at test.fenux.net to see if a fresh install works properly or not.

In the process of moving to a new web server, I came across a small problem. On the old server, I'd been using Cryus for IMAP access. On the new server, to simplify things with Webmin/Virtualmin, I'm using IMAP-UW instead. It suits my purposes without overcomplicating matters like Cryus seemed to. The problem is that Cyrus uses a directory of email files and IMAP-UW uses one MBOX file with all the messages. I found several programs to convert from MBOX to Cyrus's format, but nothing to go the other way. After a lot of playing, I finally created something that works. And it works pretty well too.

I think that quote makes the point nicely. There's an interesting story in the Ohio Dispatch about how the "No Guns" signs have been hurting people. There's also an interesting commentary on the article on the Ohioans for Concealed Carry website.

I've been trying to figure out a way to effectively create backups of our webservers content and configuration and have multiple days worth of backups. I finally came across an article about using rsync for "incremental" backups. The concept is interesting to me because it only does a "full" backup once, but it appears like multiple full backups.

So I've got the server set up and I'm migrating websites to it. I've got most of them moved (the easy ones) and I'm working on the others. On the 17th website I ran into a problem. Apache would just crash on me. It was weird.

Every time I create a new website on the server, it adds the www user that Apache runs under to the domain's group. Apparently, FreeBSD has a limit of 16 groups that a user can be a member of by default. It's a little variable to change in /usr/src/sys/sys/syslimits.h. I set it up to 50, but now I've got to recomiple the whole operating system to make it work. If only it would let me change it on the fly. Silly programmers.

I've been working on Uranus (let the jokes fly), our new web server, this weekend. I'm trying to get it set up properly from the beginning to aid in the virtual hosting. I've learned a lot from working on Golem, but it helps to not have a hodge podge of methods for adding domains to the server. The solution: A Hosting Control Panel.

Over the last few weeks, I've been evaluation free hosting control panels. Almost every single free one that would work for FreeBSD sucked. I saw a couple potential pay ones, but don't have the money to do that at the moment. I've decided for now to stick with Webmin+Virtualmin. It's a free solution and has a lot of configuration options. I'll post later to document how it actually works when done right from the beginning.