Hello again - Today's post is a public service announcement instead of the usual ES6 post. Hopefully that will be coming out on Thursday.

This website is now powered by a new piece of web server software: Nginx (pronounced engine-x). Ever since I started this website, I have been using lighttpd. While lighttpd has been my favourite web server software for ages (mainly because of the flexible configuration file syntax, the light footprint, and the speed), it seems that development of lighttpd's core codebase has been moving too slowly for me. Lighttpd, while fast and light, has been missing several features that I would rather like to have - and no release date for the next has been announced yet either.

Nginx, on the other hand, is much more feature-complete. It will support HTTP/2 by the end of 2015, and has a slew of other features to play around with. While, it's configuration files are kind of a pain (it only matches against one location block per request), I feel that Nginx is a better solution for this website in the long run. If development resumes on lighttpd, perhaps I will move back to it - but only if I am sure that development will actually continue.

So the switch has been made! Please notify me if you notice any issues and/or problems with the new setup and I will fix them as soon as I can.

Hello!

Yesterday you probably noticed some downtime. This is because I was upgradting this server's operating system from Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 15.04! Since I noticed a few things that you should watch out for when upgrading, I thought that I would make a post about it.

For the most part the upgrade went smoothly, but I did hit a few snags. Firstly, if you have got any custom ppas set up for apt-get, you will want to make a list of them (they are located in /etc/apt/sources.list.d) because the upgrade will annoyingly disable them all :( It's not too much trouble to fix but it is annoying.

Secondly, there are two new mime types that have been added /etc/mime.types. If you have made any customisations to this file (I have added text/x-markdown), then you will want to make a note of them and re-add them afterwards. Don't forget to restart your http servers after changing it!

There are some changes that require the ssh daemon to be stopped, so make sure you don't do the upgrade over ssh.

You will get asked which interfaces DCHPv6 should listen on / send requests to. If you use your linux box as a router and have it handing out IP addresses, then you will need to take note of which interfaces you have on your box and which one is which.

By far the biggest problem for me though was the switch from upstart to systemd. This server is hosted by OVH under one of their VPS hosting plans (which are great by the way!), which means that it is virtualised using OpenVZ. It also means that I can't choose my kernel :( I suspect that this is the reason that I can't use systemd, though if anyone has any other ideas, I would love to hears them - leave them in the comments below. When it has finished the upgrade, it couldn't reboot, instead telling me that it couldn't find an alternative telinit implementation to spawn. The solution to this is simple though (don't forget to run as root):

apt-get install upstart
apt-get remove systemd
apt-get install upstart-sysv

The last package in the above (upstart-sysv) should be install automatically, but you should make sure that it is installed - it is the package that prevents it from automatically trying to switch you back to systemd at the next available opportunity.

I hope this post is useful! If you do find it helpful, please leave a comment. If people seem to like it I might start posting full upgrade guides.

Hello again!

I have made a few tweaks to this blog's feed that I think that you might want to know about.

Firstly, I fixed the bug with the named html entities breaking the feed. Apparently XML doesn't like named html entities much. This has involved a number of tweaks to atom.gen.php - You will see that the script is now ~30kb(!) - this is due to the inclusion of a named html entity to numeric html entity conversion table. You will now also see (?) if an unknown named html entity couldn't be converted successful.

Secondly, I have improved the performance of the feed by only showing the last 15 posts in the feed. I didn't notice at first, but this has been slowing the server down for some time because it been adding every post I have made so far (62 for those of you who are counting) to the feed, every time someone requests it.

Hopefully these changes don't have any unintended side-effects, but if they do please let me know in the comments below.

Welcome to another blog update.

Yesterday I added email notifications to the blog comments. You may have noticed that there is an extra optional field for you to put your email address in when commenting. If you do so, anybody who replies to your comment will trigger an email notification which will go to the email address that you specified.

Currently the only method I have for you to unsubscribe from these emails is to email emails at starbeamrainbowlabs dot com, and I will process your request manually. Make sure that you include a copy of the email that you don't want anymore, since it contains information about the comment that you posted that I will have to edit. In the future I hope to have an automated system that you will be able to use.

If you notice any issues with this, please leave a comment below.

The other thing that I added is email notifications for myself. Now, every time somebody comments on my blog I will receive an email notification telling me about it. This is mainly because I forgot to check for new comments - you should receive a reply to your comment much faster now :)

Today (after lots of code tweaking in preparation), the tag clouds that recently appeared on the blog now have links on each tag so you can see which posts havethat particular tag. Currently, the Next Page and Pevious Page links are a little bit buggy, but that problem should be fixed sooner or later, I just need to make a few more changes to the code to make it more intelligent.

Edit: The Next Page and Previou Page buttons have been fixed! I have also added First Page and Last Page butttons too - the last page button was the reason it took to long to refactor the code :)

Yesterday I added a tag cloud to the website. You can find it at the top of the blog, or below the post on the article view. The tags are not yet linked to a list of posts that have the corresponding tags, as I need to some a litttle bit of refactoring of the blog's code in order to get that to work.

Midafternoon today, starbeamrainbowlabs.com was down. The reason for this is unclear, but it seems that this site's hosting provider, OVH, was doing some maintenance. The site was down for 29 minutes.

Lessons Learned

Get your server to notify you during the shutdown / startup sequences

Using a service like Uptime Robot is great to monitor your website's uptime, but it is a much better idea to have your server send you an email when your server goes down. That way you will know whether the server got a chance to shut down correctly or not.

Backup often, and before / after major changes

You should take a backup (preferably automated) often - I have a scritp set to do this every week - but you should also backup before and after any major changes that you make.