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                              Installation party

Well, I did not go to Miami [1] today because of server problems last night
(or technically, early this morning). The purpose of the trip to Miami was to
retrieve two (of the four) servers I admin in order to install Gentoo [2] and
get rid of this silliness called RedHat [3].

The other admin ended up going down to Miami anyway and delivered the servers
to my door step. Later on in the evening, Mark [4] came over to help me with
my first Gentoo installation. Gentoo is pretty neat. A “stage 1” [5]
installation (which we did) took several hours to perform, as it installs a
base configuration, then downloads and recompiles everything (given the
compiler options specific for the particular architecture for best
performance). You can also specify what you want and more importantly, don't
want.

Another interesting feature is that the base system allows you to log in via
ssh so Mark and I spent most of the time outside in the courtyard watching
the installation via the wireless network here, and discussing various
issues.

One of which was the constantly crashing server. Mark mentioned that he had
encountered a similar problem on a friend's webserver, due to the web log
files never being rotated. Well, the server from hell [6] has that problem in
spades—over 1,000 sites and none of the logs have ever been trimmed. And
we're talking both the access_log and the error_log files.

Now, I had discussed the error_log situation with the client—namely does each
site really require its own error_log? The client agreed with me that no,
each site did not need said file. So after Mark left, I proceeded to nuke all
the error_log files (since really, it's only used to debug CGI scripts and
even then, that's not a common thing). That alone cleared up some 12 gigs of
disk space. I then rotated all the access_log files so now hopefully that
server won't crash.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/12/08.1
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/
[3] http://www.redhat.com/
[4] http://grumpy.conman.org/
[5] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=2#doc_chap2
[6] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/12/04.2

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