EPKPhoto’s Tidbits

For those interested, I am building a new server that will end up hosting epkphoto.com and many other services within the next couple months. I have already put together a decently powerful computer that is running CentOS 5 and allows for multiple virtual machines to run simultaneously. These virtual machines will replace the following existing hardware and server instances: my webcam server, my home web server, my home router/firewall server, and my virtualized web/email server currently hosted by RimuHosting. More info to come on this little project! I hope to share more details on my final hardware and software configuration.

As promised, I have implemented a new design on epkphoto.com! The home page is pretty much set for the time being, but many of the other pages have quirks that I will be ironing out over the next week or two. Going from a totally dark, black layout to this new bright, white layout comes with a lot of changes, so I appreciate your patience as I fix everything. Let me know what you think of the new look!

In a couple spare hours recently, I have been working on a total makeover of the visual presentation of this website, epkphoto.com. The new design is nearing completion, so I felt it may be a good idea to post this little warning before I make it live. So, in the next few days, don't be surprised if you come to epkphoto.com and the site looks totally different. This new design will include a white background, so that will likely be the most shocking aspect of the change. Most of the content will be in the same places, so don't worry about me dropping any sections or radically moving around pages. Think of this as a simple visual refresh :).

This past weekend, I upgraded the server that runs this website to the latest version of Ubuntu, aka 8.04 Hardy Heron. The upgrade was not without its flaws, but thanks to some significant planning and test upgrades on my part, I was able to pull it off with limited server downtime. This experience was much improved from my last upgrade about 6 months ago. Fortunately, the server is running smoothly now…you probably didn't even notice the change. In the larger scheme, though, it looks like Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu, are pushing hard to prove that their Linux offering can hold rank with products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise. That makes me happy because Ubuntu has been powering my public web and email server for more than one and a half years now, and I do not see that changing anytime soon.

Apparently I've been running this website for four solid years now. That's right, today, January 5th, marks the 4th birthday of epkphoto.com. Every year this day comes around, and I feel like doing something special, but I never get around to it. Well, this year is different. Today I'm making my new photo gallery system live! In the past weeks I have been working on building a new underlying infrastructure to manage my mounds of photos stored on this website. So take a look at the newly redesigned epkphoto.com/portfolio/ to try out some new things. Other than the layout, not much has changed from a user's perspective. The fact that many photos are tagged and drive the tag cloud display is certainly new, but it is only a hint at what lies ahead. Now that I have a better database-driven engine to manage my photos, in the future you'll be able to select your own favorite images, add tags yourself, view the most popular photos, and a host of other cool things. In my usual style, all this is hand-coded, so let me know of improvements I could make as I go forward! Enjoy

For those interested, I am now running the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10 aka, Gutsy Gibbon) to power this server. Unfortunately, the upgrade took way more effort than I initially planned due to some unforeseen issues. My upgrade attempts from Ubuntu Feisty continuously failed with unending segmentation faults, probably caused by some lower level corruption that I had inadvertently caused with some earlier manual package installs. Eventually, I succumbed to a clean install of the server. This worked nicely thanks to my thorough backups, and all is well again at epkphoto.com. Thank goodness that upgrade is behind me. Also, a big thanks to the support staff at RimuHosting for performing my clean install very quickly!

At the risk of showing my computer nerd side, I feel I need to mention that the virtual server running epkphoto.com has passed 100 days of uptime (not being restarted). As quite the bleeding edge Linux user, I'm amazed when I see uptime of this amount. If I managed my servers like a sane administrator, I would probably see uptimes in excess of a year, but my desire for testing the latest and greatest usually implies rebooting on occasion. In this case, my uptime streak is going to end in the next week or so when I upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version (7.10, Gutsy Gibbon). I have been waiting for this release for a number of reasons, not least of which include improved virus scanning speed for my email server and the latest ImageMagick and other packages to run the development version of the website I built for NASA Langley this past summer.

As you can see in the news section on the epkphoto.com main page, Canonical released Ubuntu 7.04 this past week. The Parallels issue I reported was not quite fixed in time for the release, but it looks like the fix will come soon. The unfortunate part is that this will likely affect all Parallels users that try to install Ubuntu in the next six months. At least the upgrade of epkphoto.com to Feisty Fawn went well. All I had to do was run "sudo apt-get install update-manager-core" and "sudo do-release-upgrade" as described on the Ubuntu upgrade page. I only had one hiccup when the upgrade halted due to a lack of memory. After fixing that issue and cleaning things up, the upgrade completed successfully. I altered a bunch of config files, so if you see something wrong with my website, email, etc. let me know! Now I can look to upgrade my other Ubuntu desktop/server at home. I want to wait though, since the computer has not been turned off now for over 152 days! I have to say I love Linux's uptime .

Well, as it turns out, the problem I described earlier seems to be due to a lack of memory. MailScanner takes up quite a bit of memory, and when it attempted to start a child process for scanning, memory ran out, so the server killed the process…thus leading to the endless cycle (until memory became available). I'm glad that's over with. Also, I made a small change to the site navigation links on the left. I removed the Services link and added a direct link to my blog (of which this post is a part). That should give more visibility to the WordPress installation on my site and its archive of posts.

Ever since I switched to a new hosting provider in October, I have had full administrative control over my epkphoto.com web and mail server. That has been going great, but…for the life of me, I could not get a decent spam filtering setup working. For some reason, when I enabled MailScanner's spam filtering via SpamAssassin, an endless loop occurred where MailScanner would start up, see that mail was present to scan in the Postfix queue, and then restart.