Server Upgrades... lost entries...

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:05:13 -0400

My good friend, Rob, hosts my site for me, in return for helping with server maintenance. After being on Gentoo for the past three years, though, we decided it was time to switch to something a little easier to maintain, so last night we wiped the system partitions and installed Ubuntu server.

I'll say this: the setup is much faster! However, we had a few gotchas that surprised us -- it didn't setup our RAID array out-of-the-box, which led to a good hour of frustration as we tried to verify that the install wouldn't wipe it, and then to verify that we could re-assemble it. (We succeeded.) Additionally, we second-guessed a few things we shouldn't have, which led to needing to back out and reconfigure. But what was over a 12 hour install with Gentoo we accomplished in a matter of a few hours with Ubuntu server -- so it was a huge success that way.

Unfortunately, our mysqldump of all databases... wasn't, a fact we discovered only after importing it into the new system. I ended up losing my blog database and PEAR channel database. Fortunately, the PEAR channel has not changed at all in the past year, so we had an old backup that worked, and I had a snapshot of my blog database from three weeks ago I was able to use. As a result, there are a few missing entries, but for the most part, all works. If you commented on one of those missing entries, my apologies.

Now that the install is done, I'm also finalizing some design changes to my blog -- it's time to leave the black and white for more colorful grounds. Look for a revamp in the coming weeks!

2007 Retrospective

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:49:26 -0500

2007 was a busy year, both personally and professionally. I won't go into the personal too much, because, well, it's personal, and some of the details are simply inappropriate for blogging material.

Here's the short version:

One trip to Belgium and The Netherlands.
Two trips to Israel.
Two trips to Atlanta, GA (not counting the return trip from Europe, when I was stranded for a day due to storms in the Northeast).
Three different user groups attended, with three presentations.
One major Zend Framework release
One PEAR release.
One podcast.
One webinar.
One book published.
One conference attended.

What follows is my month-by-month breakdown:

Continue reading "2007 Retrospective"

phly, boy, phly (Entries tagged as personal)

Server Upgrades... lost entries...

2007 Retrospective