Alive!

Holy cow has this poor website been through a lot in the last couple of days. At about 11:40 pacific time on Halloween night, my server decided to take a nap.

More of a coma, really: it wouldn’t wake up. Try as my hosting folks might, they couldn’t get it to boot. They had to rebuild the VPS and copy the pertinent data over to it.

Now, it turns out the issue was an incompatibility between Feisty Fawn and OpenVZ. Unfortunately, I only realized this after I tried to update my new VPS to Feisty, and knocked it out as well.

So, third time’s the charm. This time I decided it would be wise to stick with Dapper Drake, the default.

More fun awaited. It turns out the Apache package available for Dapper isn’t a recent enough version to work with the mongrel_cluster I’m using to serve up the blog. What’s more, building the more recent version from source just wasn’t working. It was madness.

Thankfully, other people were apparently in similar situations to myself. My savior came in the form of a post on kodefoo, by Rob Lee. This article not only explained how to set everything up, but provided a repository for Apache 2.2 packages for Dapper.

So now the blog is back up. While it was down, I came up with a few interesting/exciting things to post. I’m tired now, but that’ll give you something to look forward to in the next couple of days.