Since I haven’t uploaded any images since 2018, I can’t tell you specifically when the images subsystem broke – but I discovered it wasn’t working today.

>describe prefix_txp_image;

Field Type Null Key Default Extra
id int(11) NO 0

… uh, that’s not right. Wonder how that happened.

> ALTER TABLE prefix_txp_image MODIFY id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT=74;
Query OK, 70 rows affected (0.452 sec)
Records: 70 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

No clue what happened that it decided that the images were not in an auto_increment field, but that’d explain why it always wanted to index the image at zero and failed the uploading and thumbnailing.

.but now you get to see my interaction with ChatGPT where it decided to start making BOFH quotes in the style of a Stig introduction.

Despite moving most of my place-of-work’s computing into the cloud, I still rent an ancient computer for less than $1/day to host several of my projects, including this blog.

It’s been pretty stable, but since I have been gently pushing the hardware, the network card has been failing and starting to hang until the driver forces a hard reset.

The NOC techician I spoke with offered to move it to the secondary NIC (network port), and I agreed. He was kind enough to probe that I had an open (unbridged) IP available, so I set the physical NIC to that address, while leaving the virtual bridged NICs alone other than adding the new interface as part of the bond. As the bridged interface was the default gateway, I didn’t have to do anything else.

#ifconfig eth1 x.x.x.x netmask y.y.y.y up
#brctl addif br0 eth1

30 seconds later, it cut across seamlessly when he physically moved the cable. Didn’t even get an alert, it was that fast.

Removed the old NIC from the bridge (just in case), took down my spare IP from the physical NIC, and we’re back and rocking.

#brctl delif br0 eth0
#ifconfig eth1 del x.x.x.x

Had I not kept myself used to managing physical hardware, this would have taken longer.

Devuan released Daedalus (release equivalent to Debian’s Bookworm) in late August, but I generally wait awhile to adopt things which have a large impact on services.

It went smooth-mostly.

I have a FastCGI backend I run the PHP scripts from, as the majority of my content is semi-static. The only reason I still have an Apache based configuration is for legacy purposes- it wouldn’t take much to rewrite to run under something with less overhead, but utilizing FastCGI, I don’t have the same overhead one would running Apache with PHP statically loaded. That broke.

This is the first time I’ve had Devuan entirely fail to pull in an entire package based upon a major revision change (php8 vs php7). It didn’t seem to notice, and happily broke things. It didn’t take me long to repair, but I did have to reintroduce myself to php-fpm configuration; I don’t use it on a daily basis.

It’s been several years since I’ve been active here; my blog has found it’s way into an extended hiatus for years at times.

Before social media was so popular (this from of my blog dates back to 2003!), we used to do our own thing and assume that others would find a way to syndicate it if they were interested in what we had to share.

For many years in between then and now, I’ve changed my personal views on sharing personal data, what is/isn’t worth sharing, and what just doesn’t need to be on the Internet.

I don’t really feel the need to share every single thing I figure out technically, all of my new tools/toys/etc, and for the most part are not as engaged with the Internet as a whole as I once was.

I am not certain what the future holds; I might eventually turn this into a simple format, like it was back in 1999, or I might address this again in the future.

I’m proud for having kept this data alive (and active) for over 20 years, but sometimes I question why I still maintain several servers just for my own vanity domains.

I go out of my way not to post personal things, but one of my oldest, dearest friends passed today during a minor surgery.

I met him in 2004, and we were good friends ever since then. Heck, I still have an HP 2100 printer he gave me (after he accidentally broke mine). We went through the ups and downs of his wifes’ COPD and other health issues, and eventual passing.

Today at roughly 9AM, Randy passed this mortal coil to once again be with his beloved wife. I’ll miss you my friend.