Category: Technology

Just in case the site goes unresponsive

Chad

Here’s a heads up. I have many(I think 5) domains that all point to here. I’m trying to make a few things easier to manage on my end and also get search engines to recognize the cdavis.us domain name as the main, instead of phpmp.com. It still seems most search engine spider this site using phpmp.com as their url. I really want to end that without loosing what rankings I have. I got a lot more yet to do to get it there, but tonight I started by modifying all my DNS entries making wholesale changes across the board. As long as I didn’t goof anything up everything should continue to work as normal. But if the site disappears off the face of the Internet, it was probably a typo on my behalf.

Now that the initial changes have been made, I’m going to start reading up on 301 redirects.

Not all upgrades went smoothly, but are complete

Chad

I went ahead made sure all software for my sites were up to date last night. The blog upgrades went really well. However, upgrading my wiki wasn’t the most fun. After upgrading it from mediawiki 1.4.2 to 1.4.5, I was getting an undefined function error that was preventing the wiki from loading. This server is running RH 7.3 and php is only at version 4.1.3. Turns out that in one of the last releases of mediawiki they use a new function that is only available in php 4.2.0 and above. I was a little bummed at first because there is no way I’m updating php. So I decided to get a little adventurous and went in to the code and found the referenced function and commented out that line. It looked like it was something that was used for debugging anyways. Much to my surprise after commenting out that line the site worked perfectly.

I’m only weeks away from a major server upgrade where these issues should go away for a couple of years. [praying that sarge is actually released next week!]

Cache or RPMs – What would you rather have more of?

Chad

I need to buy a new hard drive for my laptop and in shopping I’m seeing 2.5″ drives that have 16MB cache. However they run at 5400rpms. I was going to replace it with another 7200rpm drive, which has a noticable difference in performance over the 4800rpm drives.

So what would you think would be better: 7200rpm with 8MB cache or 5400rpm with 16MB cache?

I would think the 7200rpms would be more benificial, but I would just like someone elses input.

Update: Well, I’ve made up my mind. After posting this I found this article at Toms Hardware, clearly stating that the 7200rpm drive outperforms all others and the Toshiba drives with the 16MB of cache didn’t fair well at all. I can’t wait because the spare drive I’m running on now is only 4800rpm and it is ssslllloooowwwww!