Category nuxx.net

Just FYI, the websites on rez.nuxx.net will be inaccessible for a brief period of time tomorrow. I hope for this to be in the morning, and for under a minute in time. In short, I have to replace the version of cronolog I installed earlier today. The current version (from ports) defaults to writing all files as root, which isn’t good. Fortunately this patch from 2002 seems to have it flop to whatever UID/GID one specifies before writing the files.

I want to move to this version… This should be a quick, seamless switch. Add the appropriate flags to the Apache config files, stop httpd, replace the binary, set appropriate permissions on existing files so they can be appended, start httpd, done.

I’m just paranoid, and I wanted to give people a heads-up in case things seem slightly amiss for a few minutes tomorrow.

Oh, and yeah, the whole new way of rotating logs seems to work great. Parsing all logs generated since ~5pm today took under a minute.

Click for NEW moblog…

Well, I did it. I went ahead and moved my personal photo gallery to Gallery 2.

It’s quite a bit different, but I’m really liking it… The only issues I’m having are related to uploading photos to my moblog. In the old version of gallery, newly uploaded images were, by default, placed first in the album and set as the album thumbnail. This wouldn’t normally be the expected behavior, but it works out well for a moblog. In G2 images uploaded using the Nokia Image Upload API Module are dropped into the gallery and sorted per the gallery’s rules. Thusly, I had to change the gallery to sort based on ‘origination date’ so that newer photos are first, and I’ll have to go in and manually specify the new highlight photo each time I edit the captions. This really isn’t as big of a deal as it sounds.

I have also left all the photos in place under http://www.nuxx.net/albums for the time being. While not directly browsable, these are still the images that I have linked to in LJ, are indexed via Google Images, and appear all over the rest of the internet. Due to how imaged are sorted on the filesystem level in G2, I can’t make a simple mapping to them any longer. This isn’t a big deal either. I’ll just delete the old image location a bit later.

Speaking of linking directly to images in a manner like I did above, the URL to that image happens to be https://nuxx.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Image_632_.jpg. This could prove to be a problem if that temporary image expires, because the proper link to the original file is actually http://www.nuxx.net/g2data/albums/moblog/Image_632_.jpg. I’m going to have to find a proper way to link to the actual file itself, else I could run into trouble if the resized ones expire. That said, I think that the first URL I mentioned in this paragraph is actually redirected to the proper file by G2 itself, so maybe these links will hang around for a while. I’ll have to look and see.

One last thing, old-style requests to albums such as http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/moblog are automatically rewritten to the new format URLs using mod_rewrite. Go ahead, try it… Click this link and see where it takes you: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/moblog

Well, now that that’s all done, I think it’s time for me to head home and eat a nice bowl of chili from the pot I made up yesterday. Another late day sitting here, but at least I got stuff done and learned something.

Bye for now. :)

Just FYI, I’ve made some changes to the web-based email (Squirrelmail) on nuxx.net. In the past, it was possible for a user to go to http://mail.domain.ext or https://mail.domain.ext to access Squirrelmail. If a user was using https, they would receive an error about a mismatched cert.

Well, today I signed up with CAcert.org and got a wildcard cert for *.nuxx.net. I’ve used this on both admin.nuxx.net and mail.nuxx.net and set it up so that all http requests forward to the https server. Because of a non-standard root CA a user will still receive an error, unless they agree to trust CAcert as a new root CA. The needed certificates for doing this can be found here. Please note that all requests to http://mail.domain.ext will now forward you to https://mail.nuxx.net so that the cert will work properly.

Additionally, I’ll be using this cert for imap-ssl and pop3-ssl so if you add this cert in a way which your mail program requires and then check your mail at mail.nuxx.net (this works for any domain I host…) using some encrypted method, all your email will be encrypted without your needing to agree to use an odd cert.

Yay!

I got a bit bored this afternoon and installed v2 beta4 of the Gallery software that I use. If you’re interested in seeing how it looks after simply importing the photos from my normal gallery, just take a look here: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery2

Since it’s still in beta I’m not going to move to it yet, but that’s where I can see things going in a few months… It’s really, really swanky.

Oh, also, bornslippy.nuxx.net is turned off and in the back seat of my car. Everything is fully moved over to the new box.

If you’d like to see, I’ve got a screenshot of the shutdown of bornslippy.nuxx.net here (on gallery2) and here (on gallery1). For what it’s worth, 478 days, 21 hours, 39 minutes of uptime when shut down. If things go as planned, rez.nuxx.net will not be rebooted for quite some time… That, of course, is dependent on the hardware gods and my not screwing things up.

Now I go buy toilet paper. And dinner. Both are important. Very important.

Hey everyone… In case I host you on my webserver, you should know that I will be taking the server down for ~15 minutes, right around 12:00pm EDT today. This is because I’m pulling out the old server (bornslippy.nuxx.net) and I’m going to move the new one into its physical space. Currently rez.nuxx.net is located on the top shelf of the rack, and I want to locate it where bornslippy.nuxx.net is, directly over an air conditioning vent.

As soon as it reboots things should be back to normal.

Okay, an update on rez.nuxx.net.

In short, it’s done. Everything has been moved there. The only services which remains running on bornslippy.nuxx.net is qmail, set up to collect and forward mail over to rez.nuxx.net for all the domains it used to handle. This is just to ensure speedy mail delivery in case there’s some old, cached DNS entries out there.

Best I can tell, everything is working properly and require no password changes or reconfiguration. All databases (read: forums), websites, and email moved over smoothly.

So, for the most part, all you’ll see is some potential issues reaching the site as DNS flops over, but the TTL is rather short, so this shouldn’t really be noticable.

All in all, I’m content with how it turned out. The new machine is a lot faster. This is evident in Squirrelmail, various forums, and the photo galleries.

So uhm… Yeah. Enjoy. I’m going to head home now. I had to be at work at 6am, and while we finished up just before noon, I decided to stay here and finish the server move instead of waiting to do it until I got home.

Hey everyone, I just flopped ns1.nuxx.net from it’s old home at 216.29.181.213 to it’s new home at 204.11.33.41. There should be nothing that you need to change, but if you are running into any problems accessing any of the sites that I host, please let me know. Thanks!

Hey everyone… It looks like I’m going to be installing rez.nuxx.net in the colocation facility tomorrow. I’ll have just under a week to move things over from the current server, bornslippy.nuxx.net.

So, if I host stuff for you, you should pay attention to this. In short, if you have a message board, photo gallery, or anything which ties uses the database (MySQL) there is a good chance that there will be some reconfiguring needed in order to get things back in order. This is because I’m changing around the paths to where data is stored.

Additionally, there is likely to be some downtime while websites, databases, email, and other such things are moved.

I will be going through the sites one at a time in an attempt to ensure that everything is running smoothly. If you find that something isn’t working right, please contact me via AIM or telephone so that we can sort it out.

There should be no loss of data — be it email, web, or in a database — and I’m going to try to make things go as smoothly as possible, but there could be some bumps. So, again, if things arne’t working quite right, please let me know and we can sort it out.

Also, I’ll post updates here as things get moved over. As long as your DNS points to ns1.nuxx.net and ns2.nuxx.net everything should transition smoothly.

So, keep an eye out and hopefully things will be running even better by this time next week.

Okay, the POP before SMTP issue seems to be sorted out now. If you normally send mail through nuxx.net and you currently (or suddenly) aren’t able to, please let me know. Things should be working as before, where if you check your email with POP, then your IP is allowed to relay through SMTP for the next 30 minutes or so.

Yes, I know I dragged my feet on this, but I was being lazy.

Also, I need some help from someone who knows command line stuff better than I. I just can’t figure this out:

The command cat < file1.txt behaves as expected, echoing file1.txt to stdout. However, cat < file1.txt file2.txt does not do what I expect, and instead prints just file2.txt. What has to be done in order to pipe both file1.txt and file2.txt into cat? I just can’t seem to figure it out. Thanks. :)