Usually I blog at the end of the day after all the events are complete. It gives me time to reflect on what happened and try to highlight what went on in my world that day.

Today, I found out that the assassin and horrible layout in Acrobat reader is a feature introduced by an update. I haven’t really had to pay attention to it as I really haven’t been using it like I would working full time. And now that I’m using Acrobat reader again, it turns out the bookmarks being on the right side cannot be changed unless you turn off the new version. Can you believe that?

After you change back they ask you why and I was happy to explain how dissatisfied I was and I was proud of myself for omitting the foul language I was spouting when I found out what this horrible ‘update’ was.

If you’re reading this, it’s proof that the site has been migrated to the new server!!! What does this mean for you? Absolutely nothing!!! Well, I guess if you have a couple of thousands of friends and they all hit this site at once you would have noticed a slowdown before but not now. Go ahead, give it a shot!

All kidding aside it really wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. I just was interested in the default sites meaning this blog, the tech blog and the photo site. I moved over the physical directories, then the databases, then the DB users and then I installed the certificate, there was the first issue. That was I needed a virtual server on port 80 for the new Lets Encrypt Python PIP. After that I needed to install the PHP mysqli, do a DNF search for PHP and install the mysql* one. Lastly the photo site had an issue and it was SE so I went in through cockpit to allow for that. Still need to move the next cloud data over but that’s next.

Super excited to be on the new hardware and looking forward to the learning ahead!

Started moving the server content. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be writing this on the new server. It’s mostly the default web server but I’m not 100% sure what to do about the certificates but I think if I move them over I should be fine although I’ll still need to install certbot on the new box to handle the certs there.

This also happens to be my 500th post on this blog. So happy 500! The first person reaching out to me to congratulate me on the event gets a $25 Best Buy gift card.

I’ve been on the fence about moving things over. I’m questioning having a native database and such on the server to host my main blog and photos. But that’s what I want and the rest of the services will be docker/podman. To which I’m really thinking I want to use docker even though podman is default for RHEL. I know they’re supposed to be the same aside from security isolation but docker just seams to be the industry standard.

In any case, we’re going to start the move in earnest to the new old server so if there’s times when the site is down it may be from the move, I doubt it will be picked up on the news wires:)

I got RHEL installed on the new server, it’s so rare that you have a bare metal install anymore that it took me a minute to figure out what was going on. And I did remember to allocate more space to the root as opposed to home. I guess in systems where people are using it home gets a lot more use but I’m running it as a server and most of it’s content is going to be in the web server.

I have the drives in a RAID 6 and I’m only using 4 of them so I have 8 TB worth of space but can loose up to two drive and can still limp along. Considering the age of the drives I thought RAID 6 as a necessity, I have 4 spare drives and I found out I can get new high capacity SAS drives from B&H so when the time comes they can be replaced.

Super excited that the server showed up but a little bummed how old it is, it shipped in 2017 so it’ll be 8 years old next year, the drives are the same age. But it feels solid, it booted up no issue, the drives all seem to be fine even if they’re half way to driving age. It’s got 8 bays so I RAID 6’d the first four and will look into using the other 4 to change up to SATA.

I did try to install RHEL 9.4 but even though the installation seemed to work fine, it didn’t seem to boot. I’ll have to look into it more tomorrow. One of the things that I’ll definitely need to build towards is the ability to move services to different systems if needed. I’m thinking docker all the way but I’ll have to give it some thought. It would be cool if there was an issue that I could take the docker and mount it to Azure if needed.

I’ll post the details on the tech blog but I’m having all kinds of issues with my server and I’m not happy about it. After an update, I get a BIOS is broken error and I can’t keep up with updates. I’m a bit pissed off about it as I think I got a call from my Dell rep a month or so ago and now I’m thinking that he knew that my server was about to bomb and didn’t warn me but just tried to sell me new hardware.

I broke down and spent $1500 on a refurb server. Supposedly a Dell T430 with dual Xeon processors (16 core), 8 bay with a 710 RAID controller and 256 Gb RAM. It even has dual power supplies, 2 gig NIC’s and a DRAC card. It also comes with 8 x 4TB SAS drives but I think I’ve learned my lesson with those, I’ll have to get some new drives or repurpose my others.

I hate buying refurbished but servers last about 10 years even if mine didn’t but that’s because it’s the bare bones entry level server.

It should be in in a couple of weeks so we’ll see how it turns out.

I generally have maxed out the random access memory to all my computers since it’s about the easiest way to increase performance. But I realized that my main Linux box had 24 Gb of RAM. 2 x 8 and 2 x 4, so mismatched and missized memory and I was wondering why I was having some issues. But Amazon had 32 Gb of RAM for $32 and so I upgraded it to all the same RAM and the box is running much better than it was so I’m pretty happy about that. Also it’s the box I’m doing my docker training on so it helps that it can handle a bit more now.

My apologies but we seem to be having issues with the galleries not linking to the actual picture preventing you from clicking on the thumbnail to get the actual image.

We are aware of the issue and I’ll do my best to address this ASAP, sorry for the inconvenience.