So after some dicking about following the move from the old server (a decrepit IBM X330 complete with ATA/33 and other such nonsense) to the new one (a shiny Dell R200!) and reconfiguring my site I’ve also put my old gallery back online.  Anyone who uses Gallery2 will know that it can be a massive ballache to look after, to say the least.

So while I mainly update Flickr these days, there’s some amusing older stuff in there that I haven’t imported into my account.  For example, check out some really old riding photos, a random trip to the Strawbury Duck, and of course my first visit to San Diego.  All good times!

This year was pretty fucking great for music.  Here’s a quick list of my favourites, but don’t read too much into the order:

1. Transistor Transistor – Ruined Lives.  Everything these guys have ever put out is stellar.  They’re one of the few hardcore bands that I can take seriously – their sound is sincere, they can hold a melody, and they’re nothing short of bad-ass live.  The closing track on this album is killer and up there with the likes of Malady.  I can’t say enough good things about these guys so I’ll stop here.
2. Git Some – Cosmic Rock.  I found out about this over at C-zine where they described it as being “…like a really drunken, fat fucking Drive Like Jehu is staggering around, bumping into things and knocking shit over”.  Not far from the truth, although it reminds me an awful lot of Karp at times as well.  So yeah, I just mentioned two of my favourite bands in the same paragraph, not hard to see why I like this band so much.
3. The Night Marchers – See You In Magic.  It’s pretty close to call this one and ‘Ruined Lives‘ for my favourite release of 2008.  Ask me again tomorrow and I’ll have probably changed my mind.  This is classic John Reis, although if I’m honest out of all his projects without Rick Fork I still prefer the Sultans.
4. These Arms Are Snakes – Tail Swallower and Dove.  You can’t really fail to be sucked in by the opening song on this release.  And it’s all so polished.
5. Crystal Castles – Self Titled.  Yes, I’ve added this after the fact.  I downloadedpurchased this on a whim right at the end of the year and I’ve been listening to it pretty much non-stop ever since.  Fucking brilliant, don’t let the hype surrounding this put you off as it’s totally deserving.  If you’re a sucker for anything 8-bit / chiptune related then you’ll love it.
6. Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing.  ATP this year for me was a disappointment on many levels, but mainly because of the scheduling.  It seemed like the bands I really wanted to see, with the exception of Les Savy Fav, were billed for the Sunday night after we had to leave.  On the flipside, we saw the best weather of all of summer while we were there and on the Friday, whilst stood outside drinking beer and deciding who we should watch, we heard something pretty special coming from inside one of the buildings.  We wandered in to catch these guys playing the last half of their set and it pretty much made up for the bands I was going to miss on the Sunday.  I promptly purchased a CD and a t-shirt and that was that.
7. Mogwai – The Hawk is Howling.  I’m not a huge fan of Mogwai, I don’t go crazy for everything they do but I do like the odd song.  While I like most tracks on this album, it’s up here mainly because this was the soundtrack to alot of the driving I did whilst in Southern California this year.  I’ve got fond memories of watching the sunrise and listening to this on the drive back to Hollywood after dropping a couple of friends off of mine down at an airport near Anaheim.
8. No Age – Nouns.  Another new discovery for me.  In an amusing coincidence, a couple of months after getting into them I was in LA at a party just across the street from the cover of their ‘Weirdo Rippers‘ album.  I’d have never have known otherwise.
9. Dead Child – Attack.  It’s metal, it’s cheesy, but done in a masterful way.  Turn your brain down and the volume up.

Honorary mention:  Obits – One Cross Apiece / Put It In Writing 7″.  This is, hands down, the best thing I’ve heard all year.

As you may or may not have noticed fork.freebsd.cx (which hosts various sites, jails etc.) has had a recurring problem over the past few weeks, where we’re seeing some filesystem corruption which causes the box to panic and reboot.  We have a pair of 400GB disks in there (mirrored) attached to a decrepit ATA/33 controller so the resulting filesystem check takes the best part of an hour – longer if there’s a problem and it has to be re-run.

Annoyingly I can’t seem to forcibly recreate the error and so haven’t been able to nail it down.  I kind of suspect hardware given how frequent it’s now occurring, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, we plan on replacing this box soon with a shiny new server running Solaris and Xen instead of the current FreeBSD / Jails setup.  More on that to come, but as it stands I suggest everyone backs up their stuff and be wary that you might not be able to rely on service such as access to email and websites.

** UPDATE:  I think I might have fixed it.  We had one particular corrupted inode (that fsck didn’t pick up) which I’ve cleared following yesterday’s outage and so far it’s been OK.  Finger’s crossed.

I’ve just upgraded all ports (i.e software) on fork.freebsd.cx and its associated jails (services.freebsd.cx and users.freebsd.cx).  Most people’s sites are associated with the latter, although the former affects mail.  If anything is broke, let me know.

We’re now 95% live with the new hosting arrangement. Everything is sat on a not-so-shiny IBM x330 which is a dual 1.3GHz P3, 1GB of ECC RAM, 400GB of mirrored storage, and FreeBSD 6. I’ve migrated across pretty much all of the e-mail setup, some people’s websites, and of course my own personal stuff – which includes me using lighttpd instead of Apache httpd within my jail, and it’s a hell of a lot faster. The bandwidth and dedicated server performance helps matters as well though :)

Moving forward I’ll probably set up a mailing list so that people hosted on this new box can be easily notified of any work / outages, and I’ve been threatening to resurrect the old freebsd.cx website as I know you can import old PHPNuke sites into WordPress…

So the glue for most of the domains that I host (freebsd.cx and dischord.org mainly) has come unstuck (lolz) thanks to the IP addresses for both the primary and secondary authoritive nameservers for these domains being wrong. The IP for the primary changed on Sunday and while the secondary should have been be fine, the address that netdns.cx hold for ns2 is incorrect (don’t ask). Hence, no DNS.

I’ve got something working now – for dischord.org at least, freebsd.cx will be shagged for a while longer – so it should settle down a bit. I need to update the addresses for ns.freebsd.cx and ns2.freebsd.cx only netdns.cx have changed their website again, and my login details don’t work. It tries to mail a new password to my nick(at)freebsd.cx account but as there’s no DNS for that domain it’s something of a chicken and egg situation. Of course, netdns’s helpdesk service is shit and might take up to a week to respond :(

* UPDATE

I ended up calling netdns.cx (out in Christmas Island) at 3am on Thursday morning and asking if they could sort this out. They did, and so freebsd.cx now has authoritive nameservers again.

So I imported all the old blog entries from Movable Type into this WordPress installation, mucked about with some pre-made themes as I haven’t been bothered to sort a brand new one out (more on that in a sec), and here we are. Now I’ll just have to start writing some stuff again.

So yeah, a redesign. Boothy has done a new design which is ace, but I don’t know if I can be fucked figuring out yet another theme syntax for getting it to play nicely with WordPress. So for now I’m using a theme developed by someone else (with some minor customisations) called ‘Hemingway‘ which isn’t too far from what I wanted anyway.