However, last Thursday the same thing happened again, and this time after a reboot all I got was the message “primary hard disk not found”. So that’s why my server was unreachable for the past couple of days. It’s quite possible that I lost some mail, too — I have a fallback mailserver through my DNS provider, but I’m not sure that they will have retained everything for three days. If you sent me an e-mail recently and have not received a response yet, please send it again.

I decided to drop the idea of using an old laptop as a server, so I went out and told the local computer shop to give me the cheapest hardware they could find — which turned out to be an Asus 2GHz dual-core board, 1GB of memory, two 80GB SATA drives (that’s the main reason why I didn’t just get another laptop drive: software RAID) and an extra network card. Turns out that Ubuntu 6.06LTS does not support the on-board network card, which is rather annoying, so I installed the desktop edition of Feisty and turned it into a server system.

The important stuff seems to work again, but there may be some more minor outages over the coming week, as I’m further tweaking the new system. No more mail should be lost, however.

Powered by ScribeFire.

No mail should have been lost, however, thanks to EasyDNS’s backup mail spool feature. I run my own mailserver, but there is a secondary MX record which points to a backup server maintained by EasyDNS, which caches anything sent to me while my own server is down and then forwards it when I’m up again. Great feature!

~$ dig mwolf.net mx

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mwolf.net. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mwolf.net. 10416 IN MX 5 mwolf.net.
mwolf.net. 10416 IN MX 10 smtp.easydns.com.
mwolf.net. 10416 IN MX 100 smtp2.easydns.com

Update: yep, that’s what I did: I copied pages.php in the default theme’s directory to rss-aggregator.php, added the lines

/*
Template Name: RSS Aggregator
*/


as described in the Wordpress documentation, added the call to BDPRSS2::output(1) as described in the README file that comes with the BDP plugin, changed my aggregator page to use the new template, and disabled the Exec-PHP plugin again. Feels better already..

I did some customizations, and ran into some minor problems:

Spam Karma

I didn’t want to enable comments and pingbacks before I had some good spam protection. I have that now: Jeroen pointed me to Spam Karma 2. Although the installation and configuration were easy enough, I ran into one snag: it did not display captcha images correctly.

Using the old ‘telnet localhost 80‘ trick, followed by ‘GET /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_captcha_graphic.php‘, I discovered that the PHP script was generating the following error: ‘Call to undefined function: imagecreate()‘. This turned out to be caused by the fact that my server (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) did not have the PHP bindings for the GD2 library installed. A simple ‘apt-get install php5-gd‘ solved the problem.

I added a note about this on the SK2 FAQ Wiki page which, rather ironically, seems to be plagued by spam (it’s sneakily hidden using some CSS tricks, so that people won’t see it but the links still contribute to the spammer’s PageRank). I took the liberty of removing the spam a couple of hours ago, but it has been added again already.

Clickable logo

And speaking of CSS tricks.. I used The Gimp to create a nice custom logo for my blog. OK, so it’s not particularly creative: I used the fractal renderer plugin to create a background, and then pasted the text on top of it using a couple of the standard “alpha to logo” plugins. The result is not too different from hundreds of other blogs out there, but at least it’s a change from the standard Wordpress default theme.

However, now that the text is part of the image instead of HTML-ed on top of it by Wordpress, it was no longer possible to get back to the main page by clicking on the logo! At first, I thought I could live with that, but it rapidly annoyed me more and more. And because the logo is technically a background image rather than an ordinary img element, putting a link on it was not completely trivial.

Fortunately, I found a nice CSS trick to make the logo clickable again, by setting the size and position of the invisible element so that they overlap the image exactly. This required some minor changes to my stylesheet file and to the header.php file of the Wordpress theme.

The relevant part of my header.php file now looks like this:


<div id="header">
<a xhref="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?/">
<div id="headerimg">
<p>
<h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>
<div class="description"></div>
</p>
</div>
</a>
</div>


And here’s the relevant part of my style.css file:


#header {
background: #73a0c5
url('images/kubrickheader.jpg')
no-repeat bottom center;
position: relative;
}
#header a {
position: absolute;
margin: 7px 9px 0;
height: 192px;
width: 740px;
}

#headerimg {
margin: 7px 9px 0;
height: 192px;
width: 740px;
}

#headerimg p {
display: none;
}

My previous blog can be found at the site of my former employer, Info Support.