Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

So after returning home from vacation, the weather was unseasonably warm and humid here. I decided to check on the temps inside the server and things weren't pretty. The hard drive temps were pushing towards 50C. If it was this bad now, I'm sure when summer actually arrived it would be the death of my hard drives.

So I finally bit the bullet and replaced the nasty old beige case that I'd been nursing across a decade and 4 or so motherboards. The old case has a place for a case fan on both the front and back panels, but the front case plastic doesn't actually have any air intakes for the front panel case fan. *face palm* I'd actually drilled a few holes in the case, but knew that was at best a band-aid. To replace it I bought a relatively cheap Cooler Master Elite-342 case. It has an open front grille in front of a 12cm fan that blows directly over the hard drives. It also provided me an opportunity to blow a whole bunch of dust out of the CPU cooler.

The system is in place. It's not back to 100% yet as the motherboard battery might have died and the CMOS settings for the CPU were lost in the transfer. Also some daemon seems to have seg faulted on boot, so I'll have to go figure out whether it was critical or not. So expect some turbulence in the next few days as the new home for the server gets live testing.

So I haven't booted back in to Tiger to test 10.4 compatability yet, but it runs fine on my 10.5.8 box. This will require a G4 or G5 as I've enabled altivec optimizations during the build.

The build reports itself as 1.4.3, which just means it comes from the 1.4 branch sometime after the 1.4.2 release was made. There may be a later build that is an official 1.4.3 and we'll get to that when and if it happens.

Download it, test it and let me know if it doesn't work. If it doesn't, please open up Terminal.app and run "grep -i songbirdnest /var/log/system.log" and cut and paste the output in to an email to me. If you need to backup or delete Songbird prefs/application profiles, they are located at ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2

Songbird 1.4.3 dmg
md5 for Songbird 1.4.3 dmg

So like every good Mac fanboi, I follow MacUpdate/Versiontracker for the latest software updates. So when I saw an update for Livestation (a peer-to-peer TV app for watching live broadcasts from various stations) I was ready to download. But according to MacUpdate the 3.0 version of LiveTracker was Intel only. Lots of software producers have gone this way as they drop support for PPC, but I decided to trudge over to livestation.com and check out the situation for myself.

Loh and behold there is a new 3.0 version of the software available. This normally wouldn't make for a blog post, but the little graphics and captions to differentiate the Mac versions made me laugh. Intel -- Get this one if you have a shiny new Mac. PowerPC -- Get this one if you're in a long term relationship.

That's me. Long term relationship.

Since I was being down all week anyway, I decided to take an extra day to do an OS upgrade. So the server moved from FreeBSD 7.2 stable to FreeBSD 8.0 pre-release. FreeBSD just released 8.0-RC3 and should be very close to a 8.0-stable release within a week or two.

Lots of changes between the 7 and 8 branches, so there was a need to rebuild all of the ports used locally, like perl, php, python, and erlang and apache, postgresql, dovecot, ejabberd, openldap, openser, privoxy, clamav, spam assassin and so on and so forth.

So there were a few hiccups, but I think I've resolved the major issues. So now on with the show.

So the-eleven.com has been having a lot of downtime lately. An old SCSI drive has been having issues and causing kernel panics.

So I backed up the data on the drive, took the server down and performed a SCSI-level format on the drive. I then relabeled and newfs'd the drive and restored the data from the backups. While the machine was unavailable I used the opportunity to move from Postgresql83 to Postgresql84 as well.