Gentoo changed the way that the Apache configurations (and modules, and …) are stored so as to be more mainstream. This seriously broke my custom configuration and effectively knocked all my websites offline. To be fair, Gentoo did announce that these changes were happening, I just forgot that it was this version they were doing it to and didn’t watch the compile so I missed the notice at the end warning me about this problem.

It took me about an hour to get the config all straightened out and modules rebuilt, but in the end I think it was worth the time. If there’s a website that I host that you cannot currently load, please let me know immediately so I can take a look.

I called the office (Longview Cable) this morning to get this resolved. The lady I talked to was very nice and sounded like she really wanted to help me get this taken care of once and for all. I was really upset by the time I called, but I tried to remain as absolutely civil as I could and I’m glad I did as she probably wouldn’t have dealt as well with me had I started out by biting off her head :)

She got me on their schedule for tomorrow morning (10 – 12), so I will be at my apartment during that time span waiting for a tech to show up. I really hope this tech doesn’t give me a problem. I probably know more about networking (and even cable modems) than most of the techs I’ve dealt with up here. I know what the problem is, I just hope I can convince this person quickly enough to actually test it.

Frustration bleeding off … will just have to wait until tomorrow.

UPDATE: Hardware installation complete as of 21:21 CST. Gollum now has 1GB of RAM and a new network card (which I almost forgot to install until I saw it stored with the RAM). If anyone notices weird behavior, let me know.

UPDATE: Before and after photos are in my photo gallery.

ezmlm-make -esud4 '-t24' [path_to_list]

This command is run after the list is created in QmailAdmin. It does:

• e: I’m editing the list, not creating a new one.
• s: Subscription moderation.
• u: User posts only.
• d: Enable digests.
• 4: Digest generation frequency (‘-t24′ or every 24 hours)

I wish I knew what was going on.

I’m in the process of installing right now (well, downloading the Athlon-XP stage 2 file) …

To place the order I used my father’s credit card. He’s funding this project (as he has most of them [Gollum, Frodo, parts in Bilbo] in the past) with no strings attached. Using someone else’s credit card is where my issues started …

I had to place the order in two parts because one of the items I needed two of (the PCI IDE controllers) had a limit of one per customer (basically per order unless you seriously abuse it and then they will crack down). The order that had only a single IDE controller was about $45 and shipped almost immediately. The cost wasn’t high enough for Newegg to do any address verification stuff.

However, the second (actually the first one I placed) order was significantly more than $45. After shipping charges it was approaching $1,000 which was well over the limit that triggers address verification. So, since my address did not match the billing address for the card, the order was put on hold and I was emailed a note telling me I needed to contact Newegg directly to resolve the issue.

Phone Call #1 (2/14/2005): No real suprise here. I was told that I needed to either change the shipping address to the billing address or have the card owner (my dad in this case) add my address to the list of valid shipping addresses for his card. No big deal as I was able to call dad and get him to do that almost immediately.

About 2 hours pass with no email back from Newegg like I was told to expect once my address had been added.

Phone Call #2 (2/14/2005): They looked up my order and asked why I was calling back (they noted each phone call on the order). After explaining that I never recieved the email telling me that everything was OK, I felt the need to check in and make sure that everything was going ahead. I was politely told that everything was fine, but that they needed the contact information on the card holder. No problem … I gave it to them. I was then informed that I should recieve the confirmation email within about two hours. OK, thanks … click.

No email before 5PM, but since they are two hours behind me I figured I’d wait until I got home later that evening (I hung around on campus for a while then headed home). I got home about 6:30 or 7:00 and still hadn’t recieved anything. Since I figured they were wrapping up for the day, I’d just call the next morning.

Phone Call #3 (2/15/2005): I had checked their website before calling and noticed that they had La Porte misspelled (la parte) and figured that may have caused some problem. So, I talked to yet another person at Newegg about my woes. Apparently the bank had rejected the address because Newegg sent them my name with my parent’s address. Wrong! So she fixed that (and the spelling of La Porte) and told me to wait the 1 – 2 hours for the confirmation email.

By the time that I had a chance to follow up on the day’s activities, it was already about 3PM and I still hadn’t recieved the email. So …

Phone Call #4 (2/15/2005): What’s going on? Oh, the bank was closed by the time we got around to trying the information you gave us earlier today (call logs are nice). Man! This is getting rather annoying. I like Newegg, but this was getting out of control. I was told that they would process it as soon as the bank reopened.

And that brings us to this morning. I checked the website … my order was still on hold and I hadn’t recieved any emails indicating what was going on. So …

Phone Call #5 (2/16/2005): Why is my order still on hold? Oh, hang on a second … … … OK, I just ran your order through and everything looks good. (About this time I recieved an email from Newegg letting me know that my order passed the address verification and was on it’s way to getting packaged.) After I made sure that it was indeed proceeding normally again, I hung up. A few minutes later their website updated and now shows that it has made it to step 3 of 5 (packaging and shipping are left).

So it finally appears that my parts are heading this way (well, after packaging).

Here is a wishlist at newegg showing the parts that I have thrown together for it so far. Nothing is written in stone …

The idea is to build a new machine that stays here in Longview with me. It would become the primary machine once I have it set up and running. Gollum would then get moved to La Porte and sit on the cable connection there and handle secondary DNS, and failover everything (or at least as much as we can figure out)

Hopefully, if, for whatever reason, my connection here in Longview dies (thank you Longview Cable, you suck!) then Gollum in La Porte would be able to handle the load for a while. At a minimum I’d like Gollum (in a backup role) to be able to handle web, email, and dns. The web stuff doesn’t have to be bleeding edge current and the email would hopefully just queue up for ultimate delivery to the new machine (and maybe provide access to the email via POP3 or IMAP).

Any thoughts? I still need to really sit and think about how I want this to work. Oh, and John Spiegel has offered to host backups of actual files (nightly backups are really needed and I’m not doing it right now) and a slave DNS setup for my domains.