TheGarage Tech Blog

I finally cut power to the Dell Poweredge 6300 last night at about midnight, right before I went to bed.  It is so quiet in the TheGarage this morning I can’t hear myself think.  I bet I’ll get readjusted in no time.

I have made some changes to the doncallaway dot org domain. The top level domain, doncallaway.org (dcdo)  now points to a Wordpress Mu blog and serves a static splash page that points to all my other stuff.  The splash page is quite simple at the moment but I will be setting up the BDP-RSS Aggregator plugin to replace the simple linkage with fancy aggregated RSS feeds. For a great example of what you can do with BDP-RSS plugin, check out the Edublogs site.

This blog along with several other blogs will be migrated into the dcdo Mu database today using a top level domain configuration, meaning that garagetechblog.com will still point to this blog. However, if you were linking here from doncallaway.org, which has been pointing here since I shut down the Domino web server running on the Poweredge, you need to change your bookmark. Please.

After I finish moving a couple of blogs into the dcdo Mu environment, I am going to move the Gulf Coast Texas Blog into the Gulf Coast Texas Bloggers Mu database. It’s ridiculous not to. Just like how not allowing embed tags in Mu is ridiculous. I am going to make the hack and we will have embeded video in the GCT Mu installation and the dcdo Mu installation since they are both relatively closed systems.  I don’t recommend the hack for wpmu systems open to the public.

The Garage tech blog is officially back up. Technically it was never down; let’s say it was dormant for a while.

Everything is updated to the latest and greatest. Wordpress 2.7 along with my standard plugins — Akismet, Twitter tools, SEO, ShareThis, and backup — are all installed and updated. All I need now is a new theme. I’ve got plenty to write about if the urge strikes.  I guess I feel an urge coming on or I wouldn’t have done all the work to revive the blog.

The next thing up for this morning is to finish decommissioning the Dell PowerEdge 6300, which is a Lotus Domino server that has been hosting a few blogs and mail for the doncallaway.org domain, which has also been dormant for a while.  If you’ve followed me around over the years you have heard me bitch and complain about the Dell 6300 before. Yesterday I changed the DNS entries for doncallaway.org to point to my 1an1 hosted account; it now points to this blog.

Finally, nothing on the outside points to TheGarage anymore. All I have to do now is back up all the databases and I can shut the behemoth 6300 down for good and dolly that bitch out to the curb.

Shutting the server down is kinda like the final chapter of a big part of my life for the past fourteen years. There has never been a time that I didn’t have a Notes/Domino server in my lab. Domino consulting used to be all I did. The end of an era.  A lot of work over the past couple of years has gone in to moving all my stuff to a hosted environment and today is finally the day I wash my hands completely of internet hosting.   The fact that it took so long to get everything moved is the reason I had to finally bite the bullet and move everything.

I’ll have to replace the server but I don’t think I’ll ever be running Domino again. I’ll get a cheap yet very powerful PC and run a LAMP installation so I can develop in one of the hottest markets going: Wordpress, php, and theme customization.

I still have some work to do on the infrastructure changes I’ve been making over the last several weeks. First, let me recap what I’ve done so far.

I bought a hosted account where I have ample space on a Linux server. I can use the provider’s packaged services or I can load my own. I am using the MySQL service and phpMyAdmin utility which is provided with the account, including up to fifty databases. Each database can only be 100 MB so that may have to be upgraded eventually.

I passed on the blogging software offered by 1and1.com and loaded Wordpress for my content management system. As a test I saved several categories of technical and business related blog posts from incongruities as .xml files that I could then import into Wordpress. Wordpress did a pretty good job of importing those articles considering I know the xml was not well-formed.

After the import process worked so well on the test I decided to move my blogs and point my domains to 1and1.com. I activated this blog first and it was a simple affair because I bought the domain name from 1and1.com.

Then I set out to move incongruities from Domainsite’s DNS servers with as little work as possible. The first idea, which was the simplest and one I should probably have skipped because it didn’t work, was to forward the domain name to 1and1 with a masked URL, meaning that the URL would still start with my domain name after the request was forwarded to the new address.

I got that configuration working but only half-assed, then I somehow trashed it completely. At that point I went back to what was probably the best simple option which was to change the DNS entries of incongruities to point to 1and1. After doing that I set up a virtual host entry in my apache configuration at 1and1 and pointed it to my webspace directory holding the Wordpress installation for incongruities.

All the while this is going on I am switching my internet provider here at the house. I finally have a high speed cable connection that knocks the old DSL in the dust which means I have a new IP address here in the garage. To complete that change I had edit the A and MX DNS records for doncallaway.org to point to the new IP. My web server and mail server here in TheGarage will still be handling http and SMTP requests for doncallaway.org.

In summary, so far I have installed Wordpress on a remote host, converted and moved two blogs and one website to the remote host along with the MySQL databases that go with the blogs, and I have switched Internet service providers at the house. Though it doesn’t sound like much, it has taken my spare time over the course of several weeks to accomplish.

FINAL GOALS:

I still have at least three blogs and a substantial photo gallery to move to the hosted environment. One of the blogs is in Blogger and the other two are here in TheGarage. Of the two here in TheGarage, one is a photoblog so I have to figure out how to move all the images with the appropriate linkage.

After I finish all that I will have totally redone the way I operate my vast publishing empire. Only archives and backups… and a sandbox, oh and a mail server will remain here in TheGarage. Everything else will be hosted off site.

I will have bandwidth. I will have uptime. I will have industry standard software. I will be taking a big doo in high cotton.

One of the by-products of this move is that I will be able to decommission a few pieces of aging equipment that should have been put to pasture years ago–most notably the relic Dell Poweredge 6300 workhorse. Even though the Dell would make the perfect sandbox it is just too big, too noisy, too hot, and too expensive to operate. In other words it will make a perfect boat anchor as well.