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November 27, 2003

Gobble-Gobble

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Don't forget to tune into ESPN Saturday at noon for the BG/UT game!

Posted by Pepperguy at 11:13 AM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2003

This is what it's all about!!

This is a great article about the college football experience in general and BGSU in particular. It's really a good read. If you like college football at all, check it out!

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/208-11212003-199682.html

Karl, the author, is a member of my www.ay-ziggy-zoomba.com site.

Posted by Pepperguy at 09:54 AM | Comments (1)

November 21, 2003

A sign I'm getting older...

Annoyingly long eyebrow hairs....

Posted by Pepperguy at 06:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2003

Happy Birthday Dad

Well, today my dad would have been 60 years old. It's funny, when things happen, I still want to call him up and get his take on them. We weren't always in agreement on things, he was VERY conservative, but he always had a reason for thinking the way he thought and was very good at explaining himself. Since he's been gone so much has happened that I'd like to hear his opinion on. 9/11, the war against terrorism, Rush Limbaugh admitting he's a drug addict, and countless other things that would have got him writing letters to the editor of the Blade. :-)

If you're a charitable person, I ask that you consider making a donation to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. It's become my cancer charity b/c it's money for research, searching for a cure, and it's very well managed.

So, happy birthday dad, you're loved and missed.

Posted by Pepperguy at 06:48 AM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2003

Sputum

The word of the day is sputum: expectorated matter made up of saliva and often discharges from the respiratory passages.

Thank you.

Posted by Pepperguy at 07:02 AM | Comments (2)

November 16, 2003

Interesting article

If you're anti Microsoft, or pro Google (I'm a HUGE Google fan) this article is worth a read. Not sure I completely believe or agree with it, but it's an interesting POV, to be sure.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12603

Posted by Pepperguy at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2003

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I have no voice!

Posted by Pepperguy at 06:41 AM | Comments (1)

November 12, 2003

YAWN

Man am I tired!! I've been fighting a bit of something the past few days and last night it was at the point where it wouldn't let me sleep, so I got up and watched movies all night. Only got a couple hours of sleep, so I'm pretty much pooped!!

Lots of pretty cool things going on with the ay-ziggy-zoomba.com website. I've designed T-shirts and will be selling them to members of the site at the BG/Toledo game the day after Thanksgiving. Plus I'm getting a 20X20 tent for that game, we're going to deep fry a couple of turkeys, have a big old vat of chili and a keg of Killian's and it's just going to be an awesome tailgate at what's traditionally the biggest game of the season!

The weather has just been bizarre here today. It was over 60 here this afternoon, and then a bunch of storms rolled through and the temp is dropping FAST! It's very very windy too. Gotta love NW Ohio weather!

Posted by Pepperguy at 10:02 PM | Comments (1)

November 09, 2003

...and burn!

Well, here's what happened with my little webserver that this site resides upon. About 2 weeks ago, the site went down. Not sure why exactly, but when I got upstairs to check on it, it had rebooted and was sitting at "freeing unused kernel memory: 224k freed." Hmmmmmmm...this is not a good thing. I powered the box down and brought it back up, it went through the boot sequence, decompressed the kernel image and then, as it was about to run init, it stopped at the same "freeing unused kernel memory..." message. Soooooooo I hit Google and there wasn't much that was helpful when I looked up that error message. Most of the articles/posts I found did say it was probably a problem with init. So I decided to experiment.

First of all, I popped in my Knoppix CD and booted into Knoppix 3.1. I was able to mount the drive that was giving me problems and copied over the Knoppix version of init in place of the RedHat 7.1 version I had on my box. Then I shut it down and rebooted...different error this time...kernel panic b/c init was thinking it was from Knoppix. OK...so init programs aren't interchangeable. I learned something.

So I put the original init back and decided I'd try to upgrade the OS with either RedHat 8 or 9. Well, neither of them would upgrade successfully b/c the file system had not been unmounted cleanly. I tried to boot into recovery mode and run fsck on it but it didn't fix anything.

I resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably have to reformat the drive and reinstall...but I had all this data on the drive that I could SEE when I was in Knoppix, so I needed to get that off of there. I took the drive to work with me on a Saturday when I had to go in anyhow and mounted the drive in a Linux box I have running there. I connected to a Windows machine via Samba and copied off all the pertinent data from my home directories that run this website and burned them onto a DVD.

OK...that worked great. EXCEPT I had several MySQL databases on the old box that weren't backed up and I didn't know how the heck to recover them. I looked all over for ways to recover MySQL data and was pretty disappointed in what was out there. So, I posed the question to my local LUG and got back a pretty vague but ultimately helpful response. All it said was "look in /var/lib/mysql". So, I did...sure enough, each DB had a sub-directory with 2 files in them for each table. I copied those files off of the old drive and stopped the MySQL daemon on the new server, copied the files into /var/lib/mysql, set the ownership and permissions to match what was there originally, restarted the server and BINGO it just all worked!!

So, I guess I put this up here as a means to document what I did for myself, and with the hope that the Google bots will catalog it so that the next person who searches for "recovering MySQL databases" might come up with something that helps them!!

Posted by Pepperguy at 07:29 PM | Comments (1)

November 08, 2003

Look UP!

This is outside right now...pretty awesome!!

Posted by Pepperguy at 08:22 PM | Comments (2)

November 07, 2003

I'm BACK!!!

Well, that was an ordeal, to say the least!! I'll go into detail later, but right now I believe I've got everything working as far as the webserver and MySQL. Pretty cool how I recovered all the data too. At least it's cool if you're a geek like me.

While I doubt if anyone really missed the blog, I'm glad it's back, and that's all that really matters!!

I'm going to Sandusky to test drive a car tomorrow.

OK...time for work.

Posted by Pepperguy at 11:49 AM | Comments (1)