Sure (to toot my own horn) I created a dynamic blog which handled links to what you wanted to look at later (remote bookmarks), RSS/Atom syndication years before it was expected, web ping and Google SEO ensuring the first spot (before I told them to stop indexing me), created real-time posts for current media consumption, and even ported a doodle board into English for that short time in the aughts when it was a cool thing to have. Yeah, everyone once had their own forum for some reason, too.
I have decided to keep most of that alive for the last couple decades. It’s unlikely to be useful to anyone ever again.. unless you need to patch together an audio CD player for OpenBSD in text mode or get a 20 year old FreeBSD instance that handles ISA bounce-buffers to work with a long-gone SCSI adapter. I won’t mention the MacOS X stuff, because some of that predated it having an entropy (/dev/random) device, or even a functional curses.. and yet, that’s one of the most common UNIX derivatives today used in mass market.
I consider this website deprecated. Not sure what it’s future holds, but everything here has virtually no purpose.
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.