Housekeeping – Absolutely Baching

BSD Progress

Posted on 23rd June 202423rd June 2024 by hjr

So the site was down today for several hours: my apologies for the unanticipated outage.

The fact is, however, that I have learned at least how to move the website from one ZFS storage pool to another, on the same host. Thus, this site is now running from an SSD instead of a bunch of spinning hard disks: hopefully, it is, in consequence, a bit more responsive than it was. More to the point, I now know how to move this website from one server to another, provided the new server is at least running FreeBSD. In the language of my last post, I am certainly still tied to the FreeBSD bottle, but at least I can navigate that particular ship in directions I find acceptable. I've even been able to migrate this website to run from a 2009 laptop that's running FreeBSD: I am therefore no longer particularly bound to a specific choice of OS appliance. [...]

Choppy Waters...

Posted on 30th May 20243rd June 2024 by hjr

I find myself in a bit of a pickle of my own devising!

Back at the start of the year, I acquired a nice, new server and stuck TrueNAS on it (an 'appliance variant' of FreeBSD, run through a web interface). I then migrated this website off a Linux server I've used since 2014 or thereabouts and installed it into a FreeBSD 'jail' running on that machine (FreeBSD jails being that operating system's equivalent of KVM on Linux or Hyper-V on Windows: the OS's 'native', built-in and free virtualisation technology. As can be told from the fact that you're reading these words now, it's pretty obvious that everything converted across nicely and has been running well ever since. So, what's the issue? [...]

A Big Thank You to Gordon, Trevor, Jim and Hans

Posted on 5th April 20246th April 2024 by hjr

I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Gordon, Trevor, Jim and Hans for their very generous gifts to me over on my 'buy me a music score/coffee' page.

You wouldn't believe the pleasure it gives me to know that something I've done here, which is just a big hobby, has proved useful enough to someone that they'd actually give me something for it! [...]

Mission Accomplished!

Posted on 18th January 202421st January 2024 by hjr

My turn-of-the-year project to move this website off a vintage 2012 server running Ubuntu onto a slightly-less-vintage 2019 server running TrueNAS Core (an 'appliance' built on top of FreeBSD) is now complete. What's more, there's a backup of it running on a TrueNAS Scale server (another 'appliance' built on top of Debian), on a server I was gifted when the company I was working for in Australia in 2012 sold itself off to a rival and all the staff were made redundant. It's my oldest-ever server, I think: vintage 2010 or thereabouts, but I've specc'd it up with 2 12-thread Xeon CPUs (so, 24 threads in all) running at 2.8GHz, and with 192GB of RAM. So definitely old, but not exactly shabby -and more than capable of running the 30 or so virtual machines I need to test my software against most varieties of Linux and Windows, in addition to acting as my music, video and website backup server.

Apart from a couple of outages today as the final moves of the (very noisy!) servers into their designated loft space took place, I don't think anyone would have noticed much by way of change or disaster! In fact, 95% of the move was finished on January 1st, well before my own announced deadline. The other 5% has been getting the backup server configured properly, which took longer than I expected because I chose to upgrade the CPUs and the RAM... and then managed to buy two sticks of faulty RAM and had to wait for replacements to be shipped from Germany. [...]

All Change!

Posted on 1st January 202431st December 2023 by hjr

As previously wished, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, with as much classical music listening pleasure as I'm expecting it to bring me! 🙂

Just a heads-up, however: things will shortly be happening to this website [...]

End-of-Year Report

Posted on 31st December 202331st December 2023 by hjr

As 2023 draws to its close, I thought I'd trawl through my Giocoso music player's database and work out what I've spent the past twelve months doing, as far as listening to classical music goes.

The headline news is that I've played 3,007 unique recordings this year which, cumulatively, lasted for about 69 days (68.93 if you want to be accurate about it!). [...]

Buy me a coffee, please?!

Posted on 21st September 202321st September 2023 by hjr

The Other Half has long berated me for not selling my software, or otherwise attempting to monetise this site. I have long resisted doing so -but as buying new music or new computers to test and develop things on is getting expensive, I've finally relented, in a modest way: I've just opened an account at 'buy me a coffee', a trustworthy site that takes donations from grateful members of the public and sees them on their way to creators. I've labelled my account as 'buy me a music score', as that's what I'll probably end up doing with any amounts of cash I get from it, though a newer desktop PC is on the wishlist, too!

There's zero obligation and I'm not going to promote it heavily, but if you value anything I've produced here and can spare a fiver or so, I'd be grateful (and it might just keep the Other Half quiet, too!). Check it out at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/absolutelybaching [...]

Sorted. Sort of.

Posted on 26th June 202328th June 2023 by hjr

The photograph you see at the left was taken on April 30th, 2023 -about four days after we've physically moved into our new house. You'll note that one of the rooms cannot really be walked into, since it is jam-packed with boxes and belongings! The rest of the house was never quite that bad, but it was pretty bad: there were 150+ boxes and on day four I think we'd unpacked about 4 of them 🙂

Around three weeks later (on May 24th, to be exact), the room destined to become my music room looked like this: [...]

I'm back...

Posted on 11th May 2023 by hjr

Well, it took a couple of days longer than anticipated... and my new "server room" is currently (and temporarily!) the laundry, but if you're reading this, you'll have worked out that I am indeed back on line and things are working OK.

In ten or so days' time, electricians are supposed to be turning up to electrify the loft space. I have no idea how long that will take. Once it's done, the server will be taken offline for as brief a period as I can manage, allowing it to be hauled into its final, permanent location in the loft. That will be fun: the new loft lacks dedicated loft stairs, so it will be a matter of balancing precariously at the top of a stepladder whilst holding on with one hand and balancing a very heavy server in the other. Fun times ahead, then! [...]

Temporary Outage...

Posted on 21st April 202321st April 2023 by hjr

This is by way of advanced notice that this website will be going offline between April 27th 2023 and May 9th 2023 (at least!).

The new house has been purchased and my existing Internet connection will be terminated on April 27th. [...]

Whoops...

Posted on 12th April 202312th April 2023 by hjr

The icon at the left kind of describes what just happened to this website.

You'll recall I moved it to a rented 'cloud' server in Hungary a few weeks back? Well, the 'cloud server' turned out to be a bit of a 'mushroom cloud server'. I went to bed Monday night with everything working just fine; I woke up in the morning to discover the entire site was inaccessible. I couldn't even ssh into the server. I did the usual thing: turned it off and back on again, using the control panel web interface the company provides... still no joy once the server was back up running, however. Heart sinking, I contacted the help desk. I explained the problem carefully, including all the steps I'd taken so far to try to fix the issue. Their response was, "We just turned your server off and back on again. Try it now." Not what I would call a support desk's most considered response. [...]

If you can read this...

Posted on 16th March 202316th March 2023 by hjr

Welcome to Hungary!

That is to say, I've moved the website from my loft in drizzly Nottingham to a server located somewhere in (presumably!) sunny Hungary. If you're reading this: the web server move has been a success! [...]