Technical progress...

[Dave Laird]

Good morning Netizens and the morbidly curious...

It took me less than an hour, after I had completed all my regular rounds
this morning, to take the Debian version of Inn, which happens to be
easier to configure than Kharma's own, BTW, set it up, secure it against
all *outside* intrusion, and then make it talk to Kharma seamlessly.

Now WHY, some pointy-headed administrative types might be muttering
beneath their breath, would I spend even an hour screwing with a second
news server? Isn't having one of these dangerously-outmoded and somewhat
redundant spam sources bad enough?

Well, no. Here is my logic.

What you have before you posing for the last eight years as the CNAME
news.kharma.net, commonly called The Used Kharma Lot news server, or in
some circles, Laird's revenge on a certain anal-retentive admin I know, is
a news server with an eight year-old news spool. Until recently, I more or
less figured it would die with me, and probably rightfully so, since there
is no logical way I'm going to outlive Brian Antoine.

Then James Vahn came strolling through my virtual living room one morning
humming a dirty little ditty about RPM's that stink and how Debian is both
easier to maintain and use. Nearly a year later, simply because I was
testing a LOT of different software, I took out an antique box that had no
business whatsoever foisting itself off as a server, and formatted the
latest Debian file system, with some public assistance by James Vahn, of
course.

This morning, simply because I had the free time for the first time in
well over a week, I set up a copy of the latest INN news server, Sendmail,
MySQL, and my personally-designed firewall, just to see how it would work,
in theory, of course. One thing led to another, and as of one hour later
the news spool is fully propagated to my reserve news server in the latest
news spool format. In short, the news server at Kharma has begun taking on
a life of its own as "felicity.kharma.net", a private news server.

It is *faster* than the old news spool, even if the old spool is on a
much-faster hardware infrastructure. It is easier to maintain and
furthermore, with just a deft little tickle here and there, I can easily
transport the entire spool to a working Debian box elsewhere in my network
without any unnecessary hijinks.

I owe you, James. Now what do you WANT ME TO DO? <evil grin>

Dave

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
I owe you, James. Now what do you WANT ME TO DO? <evil grin>

That is a downside. They run so well that there's nothin left
to do but play games on it.

Foobillard (openGL billiards), Crafty (chess), and Patience (solitare).


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