The week of November 17th to 21st I'll be upgrading the OS of my home server. During that time all eclecticmind service will be intermittent at best. I hope to be able to do the upgrade over a couple of days, bringing services back up as I do so.

Don't be surprised if the website is unavailable or mail gets bounced during this period. Just wait a day or two and try again.

See you all on the other side!

I've been slowly acquiring parts to put together a new server. Cyan, the current server, is getting a little long in the tooth and doesn't have the horsepower nor the storage capacity to be a file/mail/web/media/dns/dhcp server.

All I'm waiting on at this point is for the case. I would have had it sooner but I had to go ahead and pick one that is discontinued and hence hard to get. I've got a local store bringing one in for me and hopefully it will arrive today but we'll see.

If all goes well I'll put it together this weekend and start loading the software. I'm not sure how I'm going to do the transition from Cyan to the new server. I figure my best bet is to transition the internal services (dns, dhcp, samba, etc..) over first and leave the mail and web services to last.

This will be the perfect time to upgrade all my old software as most of it is out of date. I've already got the latest version of OpenBSD (4.1) waiting to be installed. I know newer versions of Geeklog, MediaGallery, Postfix, etc.. etc.. are all available.

Not to mention redo my security certificates; as the root cert expired a few months ago.

So much maintenance work is coming up for me. Over the next few weeks the eclecticmind home will be having hiccups as I transition. Mail will stop working for a while and the web server will be done. Please take it all in stride, I'll have it up as soon as possible.

I mean, without my DNS server I won't be able to play WoW will I?

To all our friends, family and blog-readers we wish you happy holidays this 2006.

May you find much joy with all those who light up your lives.

As for us, we are in Vietnam enjoying some rather un-Canadian like weather. We're thinking about you all, and are looking forward to seeing you when we return in the new year.

Well Roger's silently cut off incoming/outgoing access to port 25 last week. No warning, nothing so I had no idea email to/from my domain was no longer working.

A pox on their house!

If you have been trying to send email to an @eclecticmind.ca mail address and it bounced please resend it tomorrow. My DNS provider should now route everything through a valid @rogers.com email. I won't be able to write back but at least I'll know you are trying to get in touch with me.

I was browsing through my server's filesystem lately and realized that for the amount of stuff I want to store there probably isn't enough room.

Now, keep in mind that about mid last year I picked up a 160GB drive for the server. I did this after carefully considering what I wanted to store, the probable amount of 'stuff' and cost. I felt at the time that 160GB would be 'enough'.

You would think that after all these years playing with computers I would know better.

There is a bit of descrepency right know between the two major pieces of software that run the website. Mianly they don't currently talk to each other so I want to make sure nobody gets confused. If you are having troubles loging on read this story for help.

Update

Well I've turned the bridge back on and added a link back to the main site (eclecticmind) in the gallery. It isn't perfect but it is a start.