Sunday, October 02, 2005

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Been up and running for a while now. I had a minor hiccup when the root partition failed fsck, but I was able to copy the files off to a backup parition, reformat, and copy them back. The failure happened at the same time as I had to manually turm off the computer (because it froze). I'm not sure if the filesystem error was the cause of the crash, or vice-versa. That's the second time it's happened. I'm thinking it might be ReiserFS, but I'm not overly worried. I pulled a backup script off the web and configured it to keep 4 weekly backups and 6 monthly backups at all times (once it builds up to that number, that is). There's a short list of locations you need to back up on a Gentoo system in order to be able to regenerate the exact same system in a straightforward and quick (ignoring compile time) manner.

I started using RAM/swap filesystems for /tmp and /var/tmp, and also for a writable /mnt/inbox folder shared via Samba. The inbox folder is capped at 100MB, while /tmp and /var/tmp are capped at 1GB and 3GB respectively. I have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap space. One nice benefit of this is that my compiles happen in /var/tmp, and the downloaded files are stored in RAM, so there's no time lost to reading and writing the hard drive.

The next step in my quest for the ultimate MythTV box is to become an expert (okay, well, maybe a knowledgeable novice) at configuring MySQL. I think that's the last step before I actually dive in to MythTV. We'll see.

In preparation for MythTV, I cleared out my 250GB Hard Drive (I moved the backup data from a partition on this drive to the one I had previousely been using on the 320GB drive for a 32-bit chroot--for which it turns out I don't have much use) and repartitioned it into one huge drive. I might break it up more later. That depends on the demands of Myth's storage scheme(s).

Athena has (has had now for a while) two internet hostnames: athena.homelinux.net, and athena.gentoofreaks.org

The first is updated through DynDns.org, which has limited selection of domains, the second is through afraid.org, which has literally thousands to chose from. RFH's router (a Linksys) can do DynDNS, so I moved that to there, and set up a cron script to update the afraid.org name.

I have Apache set up to route the two paths to different virtual hosts, but right now both of them are pointed at the same place, since I don't have much to put up. I also set it up so that each user can crate a public_html directory in his home folder accessable to the web, which is slightly more convenient than having to go to /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ and doesn't require that I give RFH write access if I want offer him hosting space.