Ramblings by Chase

Well, at the request of Lucky, I’ve installed PostgreSQL on Gollum. This is my first real experience with it and it is truly different than MySQL from an admin side. It seems that all my upgrades lately have come at the request of one of my users. I don’t suppose that’s a bad thing, is it? I’ve even put off upgrading some of the packages that portage is telling me are ready to go, but I am working on those as I type this entry. It looks like there are about 15 more packages to go (including gcc, Apache and PHP) before it’s done.

Oh ya! I just took one of John Spiegel’s reccomendations and set up SquirrelMail on Gollum. It looks pretty good so far, although I can’t say that I’ve put it through every situation yet. For those with mail accounts on my machine, visit mail.quad4.org to use it. Make sure you login like I’ve instructed you for every other client.

Very useful. I’ve always wanted to mess with MRTG:
Monitoring Server Performance & Advanced Server Monitoring

A reasonable, if a bit dated, article on using mplayer to watch TV under Linux: Setting up a TV tuner card in Linux

Or any other Linux 2.6 driven distro … nice article over at LWN describing a workaround/fix.

I decided to move my blog over to a WordPress installation from the MovableType one that it was on. MT was all CGI based, which opened a few security holes that I would rather not have open, and it required that I “publish” my pages since it stored them all as flat files. WP uses PHP (which I love!) and MySQL (which I also love) to store and generate the blog pages. This results in a performance hit since it has to generate the pages everytime they are requested, but hey, this is a low-low-low traffic site and the server is nice and fast.

While surfing around on Slashdot via Alterslash, I ran across this posting.

The important thing to note here is that I have not used GNOME 2.6, I’m still stuck back on 2.4, and therefore have not used the new spatial Nautilus. There was a nice rebuttal by someone over on their own blog.

Starfish is a really cool random background changer. I normally am not real big on the whole random thing, but this one is nice.