The Dysmey Blog Reborn
Welcome
Welcome to the new, and the third, Dysmey Blog, brought to you by WordPress.
Migration
During the next week I will migrate from the old Hostway/SiteBlog blog to this one, and then shut the old blog down. (Nothing will be lost; I archive the blog on the Dysmey Post.) I will also register this blog with the Registrar of Copyrights for DMCA protection, just in case.
Home Site
I am reforming the Dysmey Post site itself.
First, the home page:
- I must change the link to the bass guitarist's page from xen.com (which points nowhere but a dull grey background) to andywest.com.
- Edit the miscellany pages: Add the links page (formerly at the Frontier site), update the about page, and update the blocked places page.
As for the rest, I intend:
- to move the Esperanto version (la Posto Dismejo) to the Frontier site;
- to create a new section on the new Nabiki server (more on that later) and on the car I have had for a year and a half and for 20,000 miles;
- to do further reform on the essays section, editing and adding more material.
Nabiki
During the previous weekend (23-24 October) I broke down and bought a new motherboard for Nabiki, the backup computer.
The motherboard is an Intel D410PT, a Mini-ITX form factor board whose Atom™ processor combines CPU with graphics and memory management, leaving peripheral management in a separate chip. Intel calls this its Pine Trail
(Matsumichi) architecture, which makes me want to call the motherboard a Pine Board (Matsuita).
I went to Fishers originally to visit Sam's Club, west of the interstate. I visited Fry's (east of the interstate) on my way home, meaning for a quick visit. I saw the motherboard on display; I was impressed; the Desire of the Eye ho-slapped me. When I drove back home I was a hundred bucks poorer and with something that would revive Nabiki.
First I had to eviscerate Nabiki. I removed the power supply, an octopus with a cubical metal head and fabric-covered metal arms; and the motherboard, a micro-ATX board with an AMD Athlon 64, very old in computer terms, and no longer functional. Then, once all that was cleared, Matsuita was simple to screw inside the Sugo 3 chassis. Connecting the drives and the Sugo's front panel to the Matsuita was more of a challenge; but Intel's colorful diagram proved very helpful.
Then, I found (contrary to my belief) that the memory on the old motherboard would not fit in the slots on Matsuita. Foo! I had to drive back to Fry's the next day to get four gigabytes of core memory (DDR2, 667/800 MHz, as two two-gigabyte modules) of the right kind.
I also wanted a less powerful power supply to go with the less power-consuming Matsuita. However, the power supply I bought with the memory was too small. In the end, I had to reinstall the octopus. At least its unused tentacles have more room for storage now.
It was all worth that effort. I had brought Nabiki back to life.
Then I thought about the Janovac. Its operating system froze when I tried to install MediaWiki on it. I did the stupid act of unplugging it from its back, which has the same effect as a power outage on its hard drive: It zaps it dead. The result was no more Janovac. That is the third time a hard disk was trashed on that server. I have had enough. I decided that Nabiki will be the server for my local network.
So, by the time I went to bed last night, Nabiki became a Fedora Linux server with both Apache/PHP and MySQL up and running. Samba is also running, but not yet making its folders available to the local network.
You can read more about this when the Nabiki series is posted on the Dysmey Post within the coming month.