EPKPhoto's Tidbits

As I mentioned earlier this summer, I built a new server to power several pieces of my network at home as well as my website and email services.  After much testing and careful planning, I can now happily say that the epkphoto.com website is running on this new server.  The site is now much more responsive thanks to larger memory and other resource allocations than it had previously.  Luckily, this transition happened with very few issues, so most would not have noticed the change until this announcement.  Read on for more details about the server.

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This past weekend, I upgraded the server that runs this website to the latest version of Ubuntu, aka 8.04 Hardy Heron.  The upgrade was not without its flaws, but thanks to some significant planning and test upgrades on my part, I was able to pull it off with limited server downtime.  This experience was much improved from my last upgrade about 6 months ago.  Fortunately, the server is running smoothly now…you probably didn't even notice the change.  In the larger scheme, though, it looks like Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu, are pushing hard to prove that their Linux offering can hold rank with products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise.  That makes me happy because Ubuntu has been powering my public web and email server for more than one and a half years now, and I do not see that changing anytime soon.

Well, it's certainly the season of operating system upgrades for me. My Ubuntu upgrades are all set, Apple's new OS X Leopard was just released today, and Fedora 8 comes out in less than two weeks. My parents were kind enough to crash the Apple store earlier today when Leopard was released at 6pm. They picked up a couple T-shirts and a family pack of Leopard. If all goes well, I should be able to upgrade to the new OS this weekend (on my PowerBook at the very least). Here's to diving right in and being an early adopter!

For those interested, I am now running the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10 aka, Gutsy Gibbon) to power this server. Unfortunately, the upgrade took way more effort than I initially planned due to some unforeseen issues. My upgrade attempts from Ubuntu Feisty continuously failed with unending segmentation faults, probably caused by some lower level corruption that I had inadvertently caused with some earlier manual package installs. Eventually, I succumbed to a clean install of the server. This worked nicely thanks to my thorough backups, and all is well again at epkphoto.com. Thank goodness that upgrade is behind me. Also, a big thanks to the support staff at RimuHosting for performing my clean install very quickly!

At the risk of showing my computer nerd side, I feel I need to mention that the virtual server running epkphoto.com has passed 100 days of uptime (not being restarted). As quite the bleeding edge Linux user, I'm amazed when I see uptime of this amount. If I managed my servers like a sane administrator, I would probably see uptimes in excess of a year, but my desire for testing the latest and greatest usually implies rebooting on occasion. In this case, my uptime streak is going to end in the next week or so when I upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version (7.10, Gutsy Gibbon). I have been waiting for this release for a number of reasons, not least of which include improved virus scanning speed for my email server and the latest ImageMagick and other packages to run the development version of the website I built for NASA Langley this past summer.

As you can see in the news section on the epkphoto.com main page, Canonical released Ubuntu 7.04 this past week. The Parallels issue I reported was not quite fixed in time for the release, but it looks like the fix will come soon. The unfortunate part is that this will likely affect all Parallels users that try to install Ubuntu in the next six months. At least the upgrade of epkphoto.com to Feisty Fawn went well. All I had to do was run "sudo apt-get install update-manager-core" and "sudo do-release-upgrade" as described on the Ubuntu upgrade page. I only had one hiccup when the upgrade halted due to a lack of memory. After fixing that issue and cleaning things up, the upgrade completed successfully. I altered a bunch of config files, so if you see something wrong with my website, email, etc. let me know! Now I can look to upgrade my other Ubuntu desktop/server at home. I want to wait though, since the computer has not been turned off now for over 152 days! I have to say I love Linux's uptime 🙂 .

I haven't updated in a while, so nothing has been said about my spring break and the beginning of this spring quarter. I went to Washington, DC with some other students during the break, and I'll be sure to describe that more when I post the photos of the trip. In the meantime, I thought I would just mention that this quarter is off to a good start and could go many directions. I have an excellent set of interesting classes, so I can only hope for the best and keep up with the work to get the most out of them. While you have nothing else to do, feel free to check out a couple bug reports I filed on the Linux kernel in Ubuntu Feisty and Fedora 7 (I know, thrilling ;)). You can find them at Ubuntu's Launchpad and RedHat's Bugzilla.

As the quarter is nearing its end, things have been quite busy. No need to talk much about that, though. I'd rather mention that the weather forecast is finally showing some temperatures above freezing within this next week here in Rochester. We have had solid packed snow on all the walkways across campus since it has been too cold to melt anything. That may change quite soon :). Also, I am going to the hockey game tonight against Mercyhurst. It is RIT's last home hockey game of the season. Last night's game was an exciting win from what I heard, so I hope tonight's game lives up to that standard. Read on for Parallels and Linux comments.

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I have been trying out the latest test release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Linux) in a Parallels virtual machine. It is currently at the alpha 2 (v7.04) phase of the Feisty Fawn release that is set to be finished and available by April 19th. I do say that one feature that really catches my eye is the new "Control Center" that consolidates a lot of preference and admin functions of the computer, similar to SUSE's YaST. This is a much needed organizational upgrade. I am a bit more excited about the planned features for Fedora's upcoming v7 release on April 26th.

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