Charlie's Blog

WARNING! This entry is very technical and I use a lot of jargon and concepts that not everyone is familiar with. I tried to explain everything as best I could and not go into too much detail so if anybody has questions please post a comment or Contact Me and I'll help if I can.

BEGIN TECHNICAL

Some of you may have noticed that the site URL is now "http://charliecoutts.com/" rather than "http://charlie.is-a-geek.org/". This is a change I've been contemplating since...

a few months ago when I bought the domain on a whim after drinking a wee bit too much.

A little background: My website up until now has been hosted on my media server PC in my living room. I thought it would be nice to be able to access my media and files from anywhere so I turned it into a webserver, (not as simple as it sounds) registered charlie.is-a-geek.org with dyndns, and told them to point it to my webserver. The effect of this was when anyone types charlie.is-a-geek.org into their browser the request goes through the internet and ends up at my server. It is a good arrangement for a small site like mine. It allows me to have all my media and files etc... (not personal information of course) available online. Having this I figured I might as well start a blog as a hobby and that is how Charlie's Blog was born. So far, so good. I have a streaming music server, FTP for my files, some pictures, and a decent blog, but there are some problems:

1) "charlie.is-a-geek.org" while being catchy, is cumbersome to type, explain, and remember probably due to the mixture of dots and dashes etc...

2) My server and Comcast internet connection are not exactly "enterprise grade" and don't hold up very well under a lot of traffic, plus it's pretty slow sometimes and if there's enough traffic the internet speeds for the rest of the computers at my house slow down dramatically.

3) My data drive is only 200GB. I need more.

Fast-forward to present day. Basically:

I am upgrading my home server from Kubuntu 7.04 to 8.04 (just released, a year newer, and more stable and secure). I thought it wouldn't be a big deal but the upgrade failed. It still works and I didn't lose anything but I have a semi-broken system so I immediately realized that I need a more stable solution. As of now, I have copied my website and databases to a hosting server, assigned "charliecoutts.com" to it and pointed "charlie.is-a-geek.org" to "charliecoutts.com".

I installed a 750GB hard drive in the server and am copying all the stuff from the 200GB drive to it. After that's done I will do a fresh install and configure the server. The idea is to keep the blog and website on the hosted server but point it to the home server for all the media stuff. That should cut down on a lot of the traffic and keep the blog part responsive. Also, if I need to take down my home server for maintenance I don't have to worry about the blog going down.

This is a trial so nothing permanent but it seems like a good idea as long as everything works. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions, advice, questions, comments, and/or concerns.

END OF TECHNICAL

Totally unrelated. I was playing Mario Kart on my Wii today and the little bastard crapped out on me.

I'm not totally sure what happened. It gave me a black screen after I finished a race and was totally unresponsive. I could eject the cd but that was about it.

Well I pulled the power cord and haven't tried it since. I figured I'd let it (and me) cool off.

It did seem like a convenient time for it to die.
I had just finished 1st for every race in the GP so I think it's just a sore loser.