Denis Lemire's Site

Like every other Maxtor I’ve deployed in the last several years, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) 120 GB drive in this server was throwing multiple read errors and threatening to fail at any moment.

As opposed to waiting for its imminent death, I decided it was time to do some upgrades.

Not wanting to invest in a PATA drive in 2008, I added a Promise SATA300 TX2 SATA PCI controller card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB (ST3750330AS)

No hardware upgrade is ever complete without the complementing software upgrade. During the procedure I also opted to upgrade the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to the nearly production ready FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

In spite of the long hours of work required to completely setup a new FreeBSD installation, everything went smooth. FreeBSD plays nice with the new controller card and everything is now up and running and back to normal. The old 120 GB drive was getting a little cramped anyway, the extra breathing room is going to be nice!

My experimentation with WordPress over the last couple of days has proven a worthy endeavor.

After over five years of running Incoherency.Net, it’s time for an overhaul. I’ve now migrated the site over to it’s new home (www.denis.lemire.name) and migrated any significant content over to WordPress.

I may keep incoherency.net as the domain for my home network, or phase it out entirely, I have not decided on all the details yet. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any major updates to the backend of this site, and overall it needed a fresh new look.

I wanted to eventually do some content for this site but I’ve been far too lazy to continue with my purist ways. Instead of skillfully crafting yet another site in Vi, I figured I’d give WordPress a try and see what all the fuss is about.

So far so good. The installation was very smooth. I was able to write my own mod_rewrite rules and keep the WordPress files in their own directory, while still having it appear at the root URL of this site. This allows me to also have non-WordPress managed content.

My previous and aging attempt at a site was suffering from stale content due to me not having the time to jump through the hoops of updating it. The previous site was powered by my own slapped together code which is very heavily showing its age. In spite of its MySQL based content storage, it is actual a royal pain to post to (requires manual editing of MySQL tables). I’ve contemplated rewriting it, but who’s got the time?

Email as a legit communications platform has become useless due to spam producing scum. After finally getting fed up with the massive pile of spam I receive at Incoherency.Net (200+ messages per day) I have implemented SPF with the strictest configuration. After recently getting a Gmail account I have forwarded my mail to Google’s servers to take advantage of their spam filtering, however I disliked the idea of not being able to fully utilize my own personal domain for receiving email directly. Instead, I’ve now taken the strict SPF route, obviously the implementation used here is not yet feasible on the networks I maintain professionally, but for my own network, for my use, until your ISP or mail provider publishes SPF records I’d rather lose your mail then receive the pile of crap I receive each day.

After some technical hurdles all at this site is back up and running. First off Telus thought it would be cute to start blocking incoming port 80 and a colorful assortment of other ports. At first I rebelled and setup all sorts of workarounds, but in short time I thought it would be even cuter to flip Telus the bird they deserve and switch to Shaw Cable. Shaw is not blocking any ports and with their new extreme package has speeds far exceeding Telus.

Slightly before the whole “down with Telus” fiasco I upgraded the server to PHP5 which broke the web mail interface. After some additional upgrades web mail is now functioning. Time to catch a movie!