Dual Core

Today has been quite a day, we upgraded the server and everything seems almost back to normal now!  The previous server was an Athlon XP with just under 1GB of RAM donated by my college roommate’s girlfriend (thanks, Jenna).  The new server contains a whole slew of shiny armaments:  Q6600, SATA RAID1, and 8GB of RAM.

Here are a few things I learned:

1. Apache gets angry when it tries to read files from a directory whose parent several levels up has a mode of 700.
2. Apache does not tell you exactly why it is angry, instead the log file contains an error message which people have rectified several different ways — because that message is used for several different problems.
3. WordPress likes to do reverse DNS lookups.  After the server went in, the site was really slow.  Turns out I had my internal DNS server (RFC 1918) in /etc/resolv.conf.  Yeah, you can’t get there from the public internet.  Now that the resolv.conf uses the correct DNS server, the page is serving at fast speeds once again.

Well, I feel thoroughly challenged for the day.  Time to play some Left 4 Dead!

-eighty