Stuff I Do

There has been a link at the top of the admin page of this site for a little while. I run it on WordPress and it is telling me there is an upgrade available. Usually this means I pull down the tar ball, unpack it and usually overwrite some file I really wanted to keep. By the time I get to the last site that I manage it usually goes much smoother but about an hour of my life is gone. So tonight I see that it had a button that said upgrade automatically. After doing a quick upgrade, I clicked the button. Moments later, it says it is completed and check the site and everything is cool.

This is nice!

UPDATE
Apparently this is the only site that will upgrade automatically. It failed on all the others. {sigh}

I am done hosting this site at home and have now moved it to a web hosting company. Should be a bit more reliable than my cable modem and should save me a ton of time by not tinkering with it.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I was using Gmail for my domain and I just had not. This is because of two reasons, one I never got around to doing it and two the reason was because I liked doing my own email. I am still torn at the ease of using Gmail and the ability to do anything I want when I host my own mail server. Today I finally decided to give Google Apps a try. It was pretty easy to setup and it walks you through the whole process. Drop a file with a code for the Google servers to read and then flip you MX records to the Google. The whole deal takes about an hour to complete and most of this time is waiting for DNS to be updated. If you own your own domain, give it a shot.

Took the site up to WordPress 2.2 tonight.

Just updated the site from 2.0.4 to 2.1.2, let me know if anything is broken. I love Wordpress, it is great software and one of the easiest upgrades of any site software I have ever used.

This site is actually hosted off of my home cable connection. I did not worry too much about the IP changing because it has been the same IP for the past 3 years or so. That was until this week. The cable company must be doing some maintenance and I am now on a new subnet and hence a new IP. Had to update my pointer records and this site should be coming back online as the root DNS server get updated. Hopefully the IP does not change often. Then again I am looking to increase my bandwidth on the cable so might just pay for a static at the same time. The 8Mb down and 768k up is looking really tempting to me!

Sorry for the lack of posts. This is not a dead blog its just I have had a ton of other things going on and have not sat down to post anything. I will work on it soon.

The upgrade to CentOS 4.3 went well tonight, 133 packages at 95MB and I have didn’t have to reconfigure a thing. This is the only Linux distro I have ever used that made the upgrading process so easy. Some people complain that CentOS is not cutting edge, but who really wants cutting edge on a server. No for me stability and longevity on a server is what being an admin has taught me are high priority issues.

Started moving on in, boxes are still laying around and need to be unpacked as I kick around in my new digs of www.stuffido.com. I only have a couple of services up and running and poorly configured at that as I was hurrying just to get some kind of presence create here. I will need to go back through and harden down the box and clean up my configs. This is currently hosted off a little old AMD Duron 800 box sitting in dark cold corner of my basement talking to the outside world on my cable modem. Not what I would call a highly available situation so expect some outages from time to time. Looks like the DNS is already kicked in and the vast majority of the world should be able to resolve my name now.

I have a new blog of just technical stuff. This blog probably won’t get too much posted to it but it is here now so enjoy.