Over the past couple days, I have made a metric ton of changes to incorporeal.org and its services, many related to Apache and SSL. Notably, website access was probably a bit brittle over the past 24 hours. If anything seems out of the ordinary, please let me know.

In case you were wondering, yes, I broke https on my site for around 24 hours. It’s fixed now.

As I’m using Twitter more these days, I decided that the multiple tweets per day were probably making the front page here overly noisy. With that, I’ve temporarily removed it from the feed, updates will appear there no longer. If it turns out that you really did like them being there (or are pleased that they’re now gone), please, tell me and I’ll act accordingly.

After putting it off for a while, I’ve decided to start merging the emptymatter.org and incorporeal.org domains, so that they all share the same services. (This has mostly been working for a while now.) I think I’ve always preferred the incorporeal.org domain name, so this will let me start advertising that again, hopefully without breaking what people are used to.

It may be a rocky ride for a bit.

Apparently, a week ago I updated b2evolution and then promptly forgot about it, leaving the config at its default. Instead of loading my journal, an error page appeared.

No one noticed.

So I did that thing I mentioned in my last post, with the aggregation. The front page now combines RSS feeds from my blog, gallery, and wiki, and my page on Delicious in addition. More to come, likely.

Also, hooray for others making an edit or two to the wiki. Friend codes (thanks, Nintendo, for the most annoying online experience, by the way), but more interestingly, Dan has touched the CthulhuTech section a little bit, which I’ve been negligent in updating. But thanks for that, and stuff. There are CthulhuTech things I’ve been meaning to put up that I have yet to.

Also, the front page has reminded me of how much MoinMoin’s RSS feed sucks. I wonder if I can replace that…

Taking a lazy Sunday to play around with the website. Finally installing Planet, which I plan on making my front page once it’s ready — the idea is it can assemble all of my RSS feeds, so the front page has a rolling view of everything I’ve deemed important enough to promote, like the blog, but for all of my updates.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do, but on the list is fixing some minor CSS quibbles here and there.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated tangent, I haven’t beaten Final Fantasy IV (DS) yet, but I’ve gone and picked Etrian Odyssey back up, trying to get everything completed.

Why the hell doesn’t CAcert scream up and down that your SSL certs are going to expire soon, so renew them now before you forget, you lazy admin? I’m a lazy admin and forgot that my SSL certs were going to expire.

rsnapshot, the remote filesystem snapshot utility, is a nice little tool. It uses rsync to copy a filesystem from one point to another, using a diff-based system to keep multiple snapshots and only copy/download the changed files into the new snapshot, leaving past versions of the backup(s) hanging around for as long as you want.

For example, you could have a set of backups made every four hours, another every day, another every week, and so on, for as long as you want to retain past filesystem states. And if a file never changed, there is only one file in the backup for all of the times it appears in your snapshots. Pretty slick.

My project today was installing it on leto, the NAS box here at home. It has over 2 terabytes of disk space, so it’s a perfect candidate for keeping all sorts of backups. Here’s a small little config, which copies what I think are going to be all of the important parts of Empty Matter:

/etc/rsnapshot.conf

snapshot_root   /share/snapshots/

# ...

interval        hourly  12
interval        daily   14
interval        weekly  8
interval        monthly 24

# ...

backup  root@emptymatter.org:/etc/              emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/home/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/root/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/www/          emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/log/          emptymatter/

That keeps an large (perhaps even excessive) number of backups in /share/snapshots/ (owned and only readable by root). We’ll see if it’s overkill or not, but I’m expecting a lot of my big files to not change, and thus be hard-linked multiple times without re-copying the files. But I’m always wishing I could go back to old config files, so this is an attempt to thwart future regret with that problem.

Other hosts will be added soon. Finally, I have a use for that NAS. :)

Edit: another useful link: Using Rsnapshot and SSH.

Celebrated the migration of emptymatter.org with a long-overdue session of Nexuiz with the #lh fellows, served by the new version of my favorite (well, only) VPS. Pings were low, as intended by the move, and Xen handled the dedicated server’s load (mostly network traffic) like a champ. Very awesome. emptymatter.org has of course hosted Nexuiz in the past, so this is nothing surprising, but an actual appreciable improvement is worth being excited about.

Also fun: decided to upgrade my DS experience, bought a CycloDS Evolution and EZ Flash 3-in-1, so that I can have more storage (currently 8 GB), and play around with GBA homebrew as well. The CycloDS Evolution is much more polished than the R4DS, and I’ve been very pleased with my purchases thus far.

The real excitement for the past two days has been the Linode, however. The conversion was a bit bumpy, at first, but everything seems good now. I almost wish I had an excuse to buy a second, or at the very least throw more at my current one. Maybe I’ll concoct some scheme and bring up yet another service…