The machine I host this blog and various other things (like, you know, my mail) on had some trouble recently, probably related to the hydro-vault fire in Toronto a few days ago.

I replaced one drive, one motherboard, and two IDE cables. She seems happier now. Thanks to the EI Catalyst guys for their help and above-the-call support. (They’re much cooler than their web site would have you believe.)

Now, to catch up on the 5 hours of work I missed wranging with this silly thing.

It’s sort of a shame that apparently the faux ban on Leaf jerseys at the Corel Centre won’t be in effect for this Saturday’s game against the Hurricanes, at which Tyla and I will be in attendance. I was looking forward to bringing a big box of pablum for the Ottawa babies.

I thought I had things fixed when I went to sleep (about this time yesterday, in fact), but there were still some issues to be resolved, such as:

• reverting from dovecot to uw-imapd, which grates on my soul, but which does allow my users to access their email, so here we are. dovecot will be great in the future at some point, but for now it’s really not the right solution for me, especially when I’m on a tight schedule.

• a bunch of PHP and Apache-config infelicities that broke some users’ apps.

• a forgotten spamassassin installation, which bounced a bunch of email to Mike. It looks sort of like that was all spam, in fact, which would be a nice touch of luck.

• some unknown problem with procmail that bounced a bunch of Madhava’s mail, in addition to causing a much-less-critical misfiling issue with Phil’s. Confidential to the authors of procmail: if you continue to write software for part of a mail-delivery pipeline, please be liberal with your application of strerror, so that I have a hope in hell of figuring out why you can’t write to, say, /var/spool/mail/enros; many thanks.

• a classic problem with PINE, which I hate so much I could scream.

• a billion little tiny permission/group/missing-symlink etc. problems that consumed the rest of the time.

I did get SMTP auth working, though, against all odds, so there’s one bright spot.

Now I just have to figure out how to make up the 20 hours of work-time I missed this weekend so I don’t get fired.

I’m so tired.

This weekend was already set up to suck a bit.

• Tyla is away on Valentine’s Day — about which I am not at all angry, I hasten to add, but it does make the house feel a little empty. Turnabout is fair play, I suppose.

• There’s a major test shot going on at work this weekend in preparation for the release of the best software to ever bear the Lustre name, so I was going to be doing a lot of test watching and wrangling, probably minimal partying.

• I’m still behind on some work from this week, which I was hoping to cram into the gaps in testing.

But then I found out that some people had got where they shouldn’t have got, and I had to spend 12 hours buying new drives, installing a fresh OS, copying user data and whatnot over after inspecting it for damage, and generally cursing the world.

At least I know what our near-worst-case scenario is for disaster recovery. And we do have more disk space now…

I need a huge frigging drink now.

Mike gets a cookie for alerting me to a security hole in Movable Type, which makes it possible to send email to anyone through the mt-send-entry.cgi thingy. Reminds me of the bad old days with formmail.

I also renamed the comment script to reduce the amount of comment spam we see here. Blah.

Goddamned spammers.

This diary, and various other sites hosted on this machine, were experiencing some very slow web service for about 24 hours, for which I offer apologies. See, Joe and (much more significantly) Nat were clever enough to get their sites listed on OSNews, and that resulted in our poor little Apache serverpool getting pretty much stuffed. I’ve moved nat.org to its own server pool now, so once the DNS records propagate things should be pretty much back to normal. Many thanks to Dan from island.net, for his unreasonably-quick response to my DNS-update pleas.

I spent a few more hours today playing with various Movable Type features; mainly cleaning up the absymal default CSS, sorting out the archives, and fixing my RSS feed. Most of the stuff I still want to do falls into the category of “don’t make me edit this in fifty places, you steaming pile”, though there are some archiving limitations that aren’t entirely pleasant.

(I’m also tempted to add some more categories, but then I’d want to go back and reclassify a pile of ancient entries, and that’s just a horrible waste of time. Why am I wired this way?)

I wonder if this thing is at all legible with NS4 anymore. (I also wonder if I still care.)

I threatened to switch over to Movable Type, and I wasn’t kidding. I’m not entirely thrilled with some of the template mechanics, but the handful of plugins I’ve installed so far have been both painless and pleasant to use. Not bad for software, really.

I’m even experimenting a little bit with the whole “Extended Entry” thing, for no especially good reason.

My experiences importing my old entries into here were not entirely disastrous, but that’s largely because I still have a pretty steady hand with Perl, at least when it comes to text manipulation through brute-force application of regular expressions. If Tyla wants to switch over, she’ll have some learnin’ to do!

I haven’t yet figured out what to do with links to the old entries, which are a source of some not-inconsiderable google juice. Probably I’ll just leave them where they are, perhaps with some biohazard-grade warning label. (I think I might actually have some of those still lying around, because I’m way too much of a pansy to actually put them on things that I might some day want to take through airport security.)