Yesterday’s modifications to our campus DNS completed the incremental move of our library’s web site to new servers. Spent several hours “tailing†the log files to see what did and didn’t make the transition but problems were minor—mostly related to system-level fixes for forms processing (e.g., tweaking sendmail) and apache configuration (virtual hosts configs are a bit different in Apache 2.2).
The move took our site off an old Sun E250 (Solaris 8/Apache 1.3.6) and placed it on a newer V240 (Solaris 10/Apache 2.2.2). Most of the heavy lifting on the library’s site occurs on an Apple XServe which we transitioned during the Fall 2006 (our “database portal†and “e-journal finder†and a MySQL server) so this move of the largely static portion of our site was chiefly done to get off older hardware before it began failing.
The change was so smooth, that naturally I decided this afternoon to move off the final, much smaller virtual host that was still using the old hardware. Didn’t work. Don’t yet know why but thankfully I was able to get the campus DNS reset to the old values for that vhost and things are again working.
No classes next week so I have plenty of time to start the ‘fix it till it breaks’ cycle again on Monday.
Nice (and free) OS X disk utility
Stumbled across a simple but useful utility the other day–for quickly measuring the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it.
The files and folders are automatically sorted by size which brings new efficiencies to your “delete some stuff to make more room” efforts. You can read about the utility and download a copy from ID-Design’s website.
Thanks to Clyde Deda for making this program available. Requires OS X 10.3.9 or later (Universal Binary).
XPad
Another application that just transitioned from Shareware to Freeware (thanks to a spat between the developer and MacZot) is XPad (billed as the ‘ultimate notepad’). This one appears to be PowerPC only.
You can grab a copy at http://getxpad.com.