Month: March 2004

Just your average Romanian cannibalism tale. You have to admire the genius who came up with the first sentence of that article, though.

The wit and wisdom of the White House Philosophers. ‘Truth? What is truth?’

Network Solutions offers 100-year registrations. Tristan Louis ponders if it’s even legal for them to do so. Apparently there’s an awful lot of caveats about this supposed deal.

Blow up a cow for $400! Offer good in Cambodia only for a limited time.

EU hits Microsoft with $600M fine for monopolistic behaviour. Bill Gates pays fine using his pocket change. That’s really going to cut into today’s profits!

After much hedging and delaying, an update on the dual-athlon server I built and which will eventually host this site is much overdue!

The box has, in fact, been put together. It’s very powerful, and using Windows XP and a Radeon 9500 card it allowed me to play Unreal Tournament at full-screen and with maximum details with no choppiness. However, there’s a downside which is driving me nuts — this system screams like a banshee.

And by this I mean that it makes an ungodly amount of noise. The main culprits in this are the CPU fans. The Thermaltake Volcano 11 heatsink and fans were clearly not made to be very quiet, and to be sure they’re not! The noise is reminescent of getting into a corporate-size jet while it’s idling on the runway, and that’s with the case closed. With the case open it’s an extraordinary annoyance. So I’m still wondering how I’ll be able to test it properly for a period of at least 2 weeks of continual operation, and without driving myself insane.

Also, despite the sheer number of fans installed on this system (that would be 10 fans, including the Northbridge, CPU and power supply fans) it doesn’t seem to be running all that cool. It’s definitely not running hot, but not cool either. That’s rather strange.

Anyway… Linux has been installed on this box. Because of hardware support constraint I am using Red Hat Linux 8.0; this is the most recent distro supported by the drivers for the Adaptec 1210SA Serial ATA adapter. Using that adapter I was able to do a pretty straightforward server installation using Adaptec’s binary-only driver, and the RAID array was picked up by the system. A note to enthusiasts, however — if you’re building a system such as this the 1210SA is not a very good card to use; you’d be much better off with a genuine hardware RAID card. With a software-RAID card like the 1210 you’ll have to deal with a lot more limitations in terms of software and things like kernel upgrades; that’s a word to the wise.

Thus far I have a working Linux installation with minimal X support, mostly because it’s much, much easier to accomplish multiple tasks in a multiple window environment. I’m using the cheapest, least-featured, most-dust-covered Rage IIc video card I managed to find in my pile of obsolete technological things, mostly because as a server this box will not need to display graphics at all.

I’ve decided to make a number of important changes in the configuration of my system — compared to how things stand now. The mail server, for example, will be Postfix and not Sendmail. Why is that? Simply put, non-PhD’s can configure Postfix reasonably well, whereas Sendmail requires (I think) some sort of rocket-science degree. Of course I’m being facetious, but ease of configuration is the prime factor in this decision. I have a number of servers to configure, so I can’t afford to spend a couple of months boning up on the C4 language just so I can configure Sendmail. I have a day job, a blog to keep, AND a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 to go through, so Sendmail is too much for me to tackle in depth.

Also I am planning to migrate the existing databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL, or at least give the other open-source database platform a fair try. It has traditionally had much deeper (and more ANSI-compliant) SQL support. That being said, I do have a lot more experience running and developing on MySQL, so I might have to rethink that decision.

I will also be running BIND v9, Apache 2, and will take a shot at the PHP5 engine, although frankly I don’t see the blog code being brought in line with PHP5’s greater capabilities for some time. All those things are already installed on the box, but not configured yet; there’s (yet another!) series of articles coming up on the process of configuring all of those servers for maximum efficiency. Eventually I’ll have a server I can be proud of, I’m sure.

British hospital suspends surgeon over some extra croutons he took for his soup. Something tells me that these administrators could use a little brain surgery themselves.

Zombies beat Jesus as Dawn of the Dead displaces The Passion of the Christ at the box office. Gibson is said to be planning a sequel to regain the top spot.

Virgin Atlantic making urinating in public a more unsettling experience with lips-shaped urinals. (link goes to a pic of the new urinals) It’s certainly a unique experience, I’ll grant them that.

With the country at war, the Shrub Administration goes after the real enemies of America — gay people. It’s now permitted to fire federal employees because they’re homosexual. Next step: force gays to wear armbands with a pink triangle on it; after that, “work camps”. Welcome to America (Dubya edition).