I have been really geeking it out for the last little bit, well a little more than usual. First off, my HTPC fried. I was able to isolate it to the power supply, but the power supply is highly specific to that case and considering it’s almost three and a half years old I wasn’t surprised to find that it’s not available. I had another system that I have used for a HTPC on occasion, but last I used it, it was having problems, but I hadn’t gotten around to finding the cause. I isolated that issue to the motherboard or the integrated APU. And since the power supply for that system probably wouldn’t be enough to power the HTPC, the cheapest, lowest power, and coolest option for the replacement was a Raspberry Pi and there is now one running OpenELEC on both of the TVs.

Since my dream is to be a Linux System Admin, I decided to use a more enterprise level setup for my home server. It was already running Debian 7 (the current stable release) and has a RAID array, so I figured out how to use QEMU/KVM and set up two CentOS 6.5 and two Debian 7 guests. The set up is:

Host controls the RAID array and is the file server with both NFS and Samba. Each guest can use the main array via NFS if needed. The host also runs backups through a Bash script I had a lot of fun writing.

• Guest 1 – CentOS 6.5 MySQL server. This is used for the webserver and XMBC (Raspberry Pi’s, desktop).
• Guest 2 – CentOS 6.5 Apache server. I separated this from MySQL to see how a split LAMP setup works. It works well.
• Guest 3 – Debain 7 Transmission server. This is used for downloading Linux Isos via bit torrent.
• Guest 4 – Debain 7 OwnCloud server. Unfortunately you have to pay for the Android OwnCloud client and if I need to connect with my Netbook I’d rather use SFTP for security and ease of use.

I also switched my Netbook from Arch Linux to Debian Testing. The main reason here is that it can go without use for weeks on end and the less frequent you update Arch the more likely it is to break and when I do use my Netbook really just want it to work. Even though the Testing brank is less stable than the Stable branch, it provides a great balance between stability and rolling release.

Finally, there’s the move for the podcast and this blog. The first step was moving new episodes to Libsyn. That was a piece of cake, although the way I did the uploads made it so the Podpress player on the website won’t play the Ogg file. However, to keep the statistics together for each episode, it’s worth it.

For moving the websites, I first tested it by moving it to my home server. That failed. Miserably. Changing domains is incredibly difficult to do unless you export and import posts or change the settings on the old domain first, then copy it over. The problem is that doing that breaks the site at the old address. Since the domains weren’t actually changing I was unwilling to break it so I could see if the move would break it, so I went a head and moved the blog first. This required copying the files from the old server to my local computer, change the WordPress config file with the new database settings, then uploading to the new server. I then had to backup the database from the old server and import it into the new server. After I changed the name servers it took a few hours before I could access it at the new host, but once I got in, I was able to find a few issues (one was preexisting) and fix them. Unfortunately it continues to bounce back and forth between hosts periodically, but the new name servers should finish propogating through the internet by tomorrow.

After seeing how smoothly and relatively issue free the whole process was, I decided to go ahead and move the podcast ahead of schedule. Since I had thrown up the Chariots of Iron podcast library up on the server after doing their honorary last episode, I had wanted to give people some notice before that became unavailable. So that I could accelerate the process, I created a subdomain on Dreamhost that I could move them to which should be available until the end of the month. After talking it over with Wesley, he suggested hosting it on Google Drive and that’s what we’ll do long term.

Anyway, the podcast move is going fine, even though the DNS is still bouncing between hosts. While I was testing things I did discover the email for both sites was broken. Then I realized I had forgotten to enter the mail exchange (MX) entries in the new host.

That’s all for now. It’s time to do something less geeky, like watching science fiction with my girlfriend.