MidnightReign.org

Wow, my last post was Christmas eve, and now suddenly there has been a huge jump to March.

I’m feeling a bit lost on my own site – the backend has undergone a couple of upgrades, and now my entire interface has changed.  This editor is even a bit strange to me now.

Wow, it’s been an interesting week or so.

You may not realise it, but the site is now running on new hardware. The old box kept randomly crapping out, especially with all the new traffic from my other site.

I spent a week (or slightly less than), setting up the new box on Fedora Core 4, and coming up with a compatible (but better) email solution. I wasn’t worried about the sites at all.. I mean, damn, they’re easy enough to do.

My brother had the machine sitting on his home network behind a NAT (Network Address Translation), with only SSH access. He couldn’t get port 80 to forward for some reason, so I had to make do. Btw – elinks is a VERY cool text-based (console) browser – it rawks, because it understood my mouse clicks in my PuTTY session! Cool beans! It really sucked using phpmyadmin via text based browser tho, so I resorted to command line mysql client more often than not (I’m a lazy bum, I like a pretty face on things, but I’m definitely not scared of commandline).

I got most things working, but it was very difficult to test things like multiple domains when you’re sitting on a NATted host, so I had to hope for the best when the box was put onto the live network.

Fortunately for me, most of the things I did worked ‘out of the box’ so to speak, however there were a few issues remaining with the email system which I pain-stakingly sorted out.

While doing this I was constantly getting disconnected, and as you can imagine, my frustrations grew monumental. Eventually I completely lost connection to the box.

After quite a bit of downtime, it turns out that a newly installed switch was causing all my problems. Now that it has been replaced, the box is performing beautifully, and no more disconnects! Awesome!