fidean.net

We’re finally back online after about 10 days with no website or email for fidean. Our old web & mail server machine died, probably a motherboard failure, after 8 years of faithful service. Considering it spent the last 3+ years in a dusty closet running constantly, it certainly earned it’s keep.

Uncle Peter generously provided the new server machine, a real Sun server that isn’t any newer than what it replaced, but is a whole lot more robust. Since this was a whole new setup, i had to install and configure a lot of things to get the website and mail services back to where they were under the old system. This is also a slightly different kind of operating system, so it took a few days to learn my way around and get it all together.

Let us know if there’s anything about the website that isn’t working. Aside from the e-card system and a handful of movies that we need to replace (i couldn’t recover them from the old drive), everything should pretty much be ok.

The good news about the new machine is that we should be able to do nice things like stream movies, which should help anyone looking at the site with a slower connection see them easier. I’m also thinking of maybe adding an online forum - let me know if you’re interested. If anyone in the family wants space for their own website, just let me know and i can get you set up.

minor site note - our crusty little server has been running in the closet for 120 days without a restart.

I’ve fixed the site so we can now log in with safari.
As it turns out, it was a simple enough fix - Safari doesn’t properly set cookies which don’t include the file path. Once i added that parameter to the login code (thanks to the b2 message boards), all works well.

grrrr - ok, OS X Finder pisses me off sometimes. I didn’t give much credence to people who whined about missing functionality from 9, but there are some very legitimate gripes here.

WHY can’t it (for chrissake) calculate the size of what it’s copying BEFORE it starts actually copying something to disk? Why does it even let me start copying more files than will fit on a CD? It knows how big the volume is. It knows how big the files i’m copying are. The OS 9 Finder did this beautifully, and i really miss this. It’s not just CDs either, i’m sure it’s this dumb about all disks.

And another thing - why can’t i make multiple copies of something without copying the source files to each new volume? Sure, i could make a disk image, but why can’t it be an option in the burn disk window?

In the Finder, in list view, why does the window jump to the left when i want to rename a file? There’s no reason for it.

It’s good to know the dns is working properly - we’re seconding now for Pete, and vice-versa.

It’s no small testiment that i can now set up and troubleshoot a secondary dns server while fighting off the mid-afternoon sleepies. Maybe unix isn’t so hard after all.