The MacDeskBlog

So, here’s what’s going on with MacDesktops these days. My current production web server is running on a Blue & White G3 with a 500MHz upgrade card in it. It’s running Mac OS X 10.0. It’s located 3000 miles away from me. The folks at NetStep are great in that they are happy to reboot the machine for me, and they’re giving me a pretty good deal on co-location fees. I can’t, however have them upgrade the OS for me, and I’d be scared to have them try anyway. I’m running out of disk space on that computer. Fortunately, I had an extra disk in it, so I switched the web server over to the new disk early this week. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I spent a few months trying to configure a couple of Graphite G4s as my new production and development servers running Mac OS X Server 10.3. But I had a bunch of problems with them, including a bad hard drive and having the machines crash. So, I decided to cut my losses on those for the time being.

A MacDesktops patron suggested GoDaddy to me as a new hosting solution. So I signed up for a Virtual Dedicated Server with them. It looked like the right scale of solution for me, and the price was good. I was a little bit leery about being hosted on Linux again, but I administered the MacNN servers which were running Linux a few years ago. So, when my production G3 died on a Friday after everyone at NetStep had gone home for the weekend, I decided to cut over to the GoDaddy server rather than get the NetStep folks to head back into the office for me (which they would have done, had I asked). Well, you’re probably familiar with how that experiment turned out. The Virtual Dedicated Server is great under a light load, but something was causing Apache to lock up frequently under a heavy load. After about a week of that, I switched back to the G3 (using the larger hard disk).

Moral of the story so far is that a four year version of Mac OS X running on six year old Apple hardware is at least as (and probably more) robust and stable than the current release of Red Hat running on Intel hardware.

So, right now, I’m back to using the B&W G3 as the web server, while the database is still running on the Linux server. I’m pondering my options:

1. limp along as is until I can rewrite the site entirely, hoping that doing so eliminates whatever is causing Apache to lock up
2. switch to a Dedicated Server (instead of a Virtual Dedicated Server) at GoDaddy
3. get separate Virtual Dedicated Servers for the database and web server
4. keep the Virtual Dedicated Server as the database and get a Dedicated Server for the web server
5. go back to building the G4s

I’m leaning toward the first option right now, primarily because I have too much going on in the rest of my life right now (see previous post) to deal with setting up another server right now. If either or both of current servers becomes too unstable (the database, for instance, seems to bog down periodically), I’ll be forced into short term action again.

Almost as an aside, the new server environment afforded me the opportunity to try out an upgrade to phpBB which powers my Gamers’ Log site, upgrade phpAdsNew and phpMyAdmin on MacDesktops, and to try out this blogging software (which I hope to integrate into MacDesktops during that rewrite).

Well, I decided to add a blog to MacDesktops. At this point, it will mostly be to record the trials and tribulations of the foundation replacement fiasco for “the building formerly known as my house”. I’ll toss in some stuff about my site as well.

My house is 10 feet in the air right now, standing on 6 piles of logs, while the remnants of a brand new but horribly wrong foundation are being jackhammered out. The foundation demolition was supposed to take about a week, but we’re closing in on two already. The horribly wrong foundation, as it turns out, was way over-poured in some areas and way under-poured in others. The garage, on one hand, had only a 2 inch slab. The perimeter foundation, on the other, was 10 inches thick, and 34-38 deep deep, standing 10-12 inches above grade and 3-6 inches above the slab. Ugh. The latest estimate is that we’re supposed to be finished with demolition by Friday. I hope this date doesn’t slip by too. Really need to get back on schedule and back on budget.