Denis Lemire's Site

The goal was rather simple, take my infinitely useful FreeBSD box and scale it down to more practical metrics. Less space, less energy, no noise. The tool for the job: 10 years of technological progress.

Well, I’m not sure if that was the goal or the excuse, sometimes one simply gets an itch. An urge to integrate new hardware and drag old and reliable but bulky and power hungry hardware to the curb.

Maybe I’m being too specific in the details to label this as a recurring rite… but a good intro is a good intro, I’m sticking with it.

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As a new year approaches, I find myself glancing at this site in realization… Gee, it’s now a matter of months until I can say I haven’t posted here in two years!

That’s quite alright… Unless I have something substantial to justify one of my long winded posts, its just so much easier to spew at 140 character intervals! I’m now a fully formed twitter addict.

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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?