MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

Last January, I finally got around to reinstalling the wiki software I had before my web server crashed and burnt. Of course, by then there was an update and I installed the newer version.

I got it to look beautiful. I spent a lot of time, adding one thing at a time and making sure that I could see the wiki and there were no errors. Except that it appears I didn't check that it actually worked. It happily goes into the edit page, and I can type stuff in there, but then, when I try to save my words, the old words are back again, in the edit page.

I searched the mailing list for other people who had this problem with no luck. I thought I had some funny permission problem going on, so I asked some people who ought to know, and finally got vonstrassburg to have a look at it. He threw his hands in the air at disgust with the code of the wiki software I chose and suggested I get some different software.

More recently, I've been trying to work out if I can reduce my internet costs and thought I could go onto a plan with a dynamic IP, get rid of the webserver and go with damned_colonial's suggestion of using dreamhost to do what I want, without having to support a linux box I don't have time for.

Alas, my kids are downloading about 30GB a month, so the plan I'm on is about right so the "get rid of electricity consuming, fragile hard disk, linux box that I'm not sure of" option would just cost me more per month.


For $US8 per month, I can find the time to sort out these problems. I thought.

Tonight was another linux frustration evening. I tried to install mediawiki. It has a config page to set it up. That worked. Except I need php5 and the "yum install" options I tried wouldn't work.

So I tried to install an earlier version of mediawiki. The helpful config page worked fine. Until it decided it needed a later version of mysql. And of course, the yum install AND yum upgrade options for mysql didn't work either.

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Thanks for listening, while collecting the links to explain my problem, I solved it.

I've just installed an even older version of mediawiki. One that doesn't need the latest php OR mysql.

And it looks like it works. Hooray!

I'm planning to use G's 40GB hard disk to replace the dead as a dodo hard disk I mentioned last week.

I was stupid and tired when I got home this arvo, so I let mr_bassman get on with copying/ghosting the data from G's 40GB hard disk to the new 120GB hard disk He used partition magic and it didn't work.

After my nap, based on an off the cuff comment of vonstrassburg's, I did my usual internet research, found this site and had a go.

Twice.

I keep getting an i/o error on the old hard drive when I do the dd from partition to partition. I've ignored it and gone on with the process as described, although the error message in the root terminal window I'm using suggests that the qtparted on the knoppix cd I have doesn't support NTFS. The partition seems to be the correct size when I check it with knoppix, but when I boot into windows, via the old disk, it's only reading two drives each with 46GB of space, and the new one doesn't have as much data as it should.

Now what do I do?

Without any other suggestions I'm nearly at the point where I will format the new 120GB drive, reinstall windows on it and reinstall the small number of applications G says he had on his old drive. I guess I'll even put his data back onto the new drive.

THEN I can start the rebuild process on the webserver.

The good thing about all this is that I have knitted about 10 rows of my new beret. Formatting and partitioning hard disks is a process perfectly suited to getting other things done.