Well, I know that most of you, if not all, are not tech-inclined. If I were to go into all the details of my server rebuild, you would probably lose consciousness and break your nose on your desk. I don’t particularly want to have your broken nose on my conscience, so I’ll spare you the bloody details. I will, however, not spare you from the details which do not happen to be blood-soaked. Dear God, I can’t type tonight.

Last week, I noticed my server was starting to bog down a little bit. It had a lot of stuff on there that I could get rid of (as well as a fancy-shmancy GUI that no one was using anymore), as well as room for a lot of upgrades. So I backed that sucker up, wiped ‘er clean, and loaded it up with Darwin. I thought to myself, “No need for a GUI on this box, so Darwin will be perfect!” Turns out, Darwin is far from perfect, it’s a lot more like what it actually is: the stripped-down, non-proprietary core of OS X which has been thrown back to the open-source community like leftover scraps to try to appease them. After a couple days fiddling with that and getting almost nowhere, I stumbled upon a way to simply disable the GUI in OS X itself — all the bang for less, uh, buck. Bucking broncos, or whatever.

So wipe it again, install Tiger (the server was previously running Panther), edit a few files and disable those pretty but ultimately useless and resource-hogging widgets. Great. Time to recreate all the work I’ve done over the past several years. Mail server? How do I do that again? Where the hell are all the supporting libraries I need to compile PHP? The good news is that Apple made Tiger a lot more like standard Unices and there are a lot more standard libraries in place, and a lot fewer wacky things that need to happen to compile programs. Combine that with ever-increasing support for OS X by developers and it was a lot easier than I expected.

I know you don’t care (well, Mike will if he reads this), but because I’m proud of it (and because it’ll be fun to look back and laugh at):

• Tiger – up from Panther. Biggest improvements are seen here.
• Apache 2.2.0 – up from 2.0.54
• PHP 5.1.1 – up from 5.0.3
• Exim 4.6.0 – uhh… can’t remember. Prolly the same version
• Courier-IMAP 4.0.6 – up from 3.0.8
• MySQL 5.0.17 – up from 4.0.somethingorother
• And the latest versions of all those other supporting libraries and things one needs to do anything useful, compiled with GCC 4 for added flavor

Filter out all those virtual hosts which no longer matter… get rid of all those databases which I’m no longer using… mmm, so fresh and clean! All in all, I’m running with about 200 megs more free memory than I used to be. That’s a 200% increase, yum! Couple that with the newest, shiniest versions of everything and the server just feels more lithe, more sprightly, more acrobatic than its 500 MHz really is.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 1:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.