The Surgery

Alas, poor Derek, I knew him well.

My first-ever, now ailing Linux server was retired today. The low-end Pentium with 40MB of RAM had past its Use-By date some time ago, and with the bedding-down of Derek’s replacement, the imaginatively titled “Derek2″, it was time to say goodbye.

Derek was built in January 2002 (according to my “anally retentive notebook” as it’s fondly known by myself and Graeme) and served as an ADSL gateway, DHCP server, time server and NAT machine for many years. It even used to run Apache to test web pages, and for the last 12 months struggled under the weight of THIS VERY BLOG running WordPress and MySQL.

When it was switched off today, Derek was running the latest patched-up version of Red Hat Linux version 7.2 (codenamed, appropriately, “Enigma”) which had been unsupported for some years. Red Hat eventually merged with the Fedora project back in 2003.

I snapped some last-minute photos before issuing Derek’s final shutdown -h now.

Farewell old friend!

Last week on Tech Talk Radio I spoke about the magical, automatic upgrade of my Ubuntu desktop from “Dapper Drake” (version 6.06) to “Hardy Heron” (version 8.04). Despite Andrew’s timely Nerd Alert and me nearly spilling coffee all over my microphone, it’s still worthy to marvel, for a brief moment, about what the Ubuntu development community has actually achieved.

Firstly, Ubuntu is a PC desktop operating system. It’s based on a Debian flavour of Linux and is an open source project. “Open source” means that both the source code and the distribution itself are freely available. It is not a proprietary, closed operating system like Microsoft’s WindowsXP, which is an alternative desktop operating system with which you may also be familiar.

Now the guys and girls in the Ubuntu developer community are dedicated to making the system easy to install, use and support. They release regular updates, just like Microsoft, to fix software glitches and enhance system security.

I was running version 6.06 (released in June, 2006) on my desktop and was aware that 8.04 (released in April, 2008) had been made available for download. I had decided to upgrade the system at some point in time, when I had five minutes to scratch myself. It wasn’t a huge priority because 6.06 was running well and I figured there would be the usual unavoidable dramas of downloading new disc images, backing up data, upgrading, fixing dependency and compatibility problems and blowing an entire day; not because it was Ubuntu, but simply because it was an operating system upgrade, something notoriously time-consuming in the PC world.

But imagine my astonishment, joy, surprise and excitement when the built-in Update Manager offered to upgrade my operating system for me! Here’s the dialogue that got my heart racing:

Just to clarify what this means: the operating system is offering to upgrade itself. At no charge. Just by clicking a button labelled “Upgrade”. Can you imagine the Microsoft “Windows Update” service offering to upgrade your WindowsXP installation to Vista, via the internet?!?!

No, neither can I.

Notice the “LTS” designation, which stands for Long Term Support.  This means that the development team offers at least three years of updates, patches and troubleshooting for this version.  New versions of Ubuntu come out all the time, but most are only supported up until the next release.  8.04 is the first LTS designation to emerge since 6.06.  Presumably 6.06 will be supported until at least June 2009, and this new 8.04 will be supported until at least April 2011.  For more info read the Ubuntu Wiki on LTS releases.

So anyway, I clicked the “Upgrade” button:

The progress bar continuously revised its “time remaining” estimation as it downloaded files of different sizes and my blisteringly-fast uncapped Australian ADSL1 varied (wobbled) in speed.

Soon the Update Manager had everything it needed. I received the following warning, which was OK and is largely self-explanatory.  Note that Canonical Ltd. is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu development team, and offers contracted help-desk support for commercial (server) installations of the product:

Clicked “Close”.  Next screen: did I want to start the upgrade?  Yes please!  The download estimation was fairly close too:

More software was downloaded, packages were installed and applications were configured:

After an hour or so, I was prompted to reboot.  Hey, presto!  Say hello to Ubuntu 8.04 - “Hardy Heron”.

Some things I like about Ubuntu 8.04 over 6.06:

• Definite speed improvement. My primary workstation is a modest “Armapro”-badged PC from Westan running an Intel Celeron with 1GB of RAM.  It screams along.
• Nice visual effects. I got brave and tweaked the Desktop Visual Effects to enable nice window transitions, ALT-TAB’ing and even pseudo-”aeroglass” effects without a fancy video card!
• Latest software. The Upgrade Manager also kindly brought me up-to-date with several frequently-used applications, like Open Office (which was running 2.0, now 2.4.1) and GAIM Instant Messaging (now replaced with Pidgin 2.4.1).
• Bookmarks, user settings all preserved through the upgrade. As was browsing history, recently opened files, printer settings and other useful user data.  I did however appear to lose all my network shortcuts on the Ubuntu desktop.  These were reinstated without fuss however.

All in all I’m very impressed with the simple upgrade strategy that just worked.  I’ll be using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice for some time yet.

If you want to download Ubuntu to give it a try, go to the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Download Page.

If you’re running (or using) an Apache web server, there are two log files which are extremely useful for monitoring the health of your website. These are the Access Log and the Error Log.

When a page is served correctly, you’ll normally see a log line like this one:

66.249.66.175 - - [08/Jul/2008:23:40:23 +1000]
“GET /images/buttons/home.jpg HTTP/1.1″ 200 15371

The group of numbers at the start of the line is the IP address of the remote computer, requesting a web page, file or image from your server. The next two hyphens are sometimes filled by a username, if the requested file or directory is protected (for example, by a .htaccess file). The date, time and timezone information come next, followed by the actual request sent by the remote computer’s browser. In this case, the remote browser is requesting (GET) an image, “home.jpg” which Apache tells us is 15,371 bytes-worth of information. This was sent successfully (code 200).

If a requested file doesn’t exist, that code 200 will be replaced by the well-known Error 404 - File Not Found. In this case a corresponding line would be written in the Error Log.

Keeping a close eye on my web server logs, I noticed a large number of requests which were answered with an Error 304, like this:

66.249.66.175 - - [09/Jul/2008:00:32:38 +1000]
“GET /sitemap.xml HTTP/1.1″ 304 -

I’d never seen an Error 304 in a web browser, and I couldn’t understand why this was being issued. Time to do some research.

Error 304 is an error level rather than an actual error, much like the code 200. This code means “Page Not Modified”. Apache is returning this code to a web browser, and to save on bandwidth, tells the web browser that the page (or sitemap file in this instance) hasn’t been modified and to use cached data instead.

When the web browser sends its GET request, it also sends the date and time that it (the web browser) last loaded or cached the file. If Apache knows that it hasn’t been modified since this date and time, it returns a code 304, instead of the same page all over again. So the browser ends-up displaying just what it’s got cached. Cool huh?

Of course if the file had been modified, Apache would return a code 200 to the browser along with the new file.

Here’s some more reading for those interested:

• A technical explanation of Error 304

I’ve started jotting down some notes about SEO’ing The Surgery.

Have a look at the bottom of the “Great WordPress Installation” page. I’ll let you know how it pans out. My aim is to be the Number 1 result when someone Googles the word “technology”. (Who said I wasn’t an optimist?)

BTW Lidija Davis has got some great SEO tips and tricks on BlogWell.

What is Search Engine Optimisation? SEO is the manipulation of a webpage or blog, to increase its favourable exposure to search engines such as Google. The aim is to drive traffic to your site through organic search results, i.e., to have a good search result ranking when someone searches for keywords contained in your site.

While it’s not an exact science, there are many things which can be done to increase exposure to search engines, and just as many “bad” things which will cause search engines to switch off and look elsewhere.

Here’s a wiki on SEO. Notice I put the link under some meaningful words, not the word “here”. There’s a free tip for you!

Warning: SEO is highly addictive and will chew-up hours of web browsing, coding and time spent fiddling around in Google Webmaster Tools. Enjoy!

But wait! There’s more!

In order for Action Item Man to own this challenge, he needs to be goal-oriented and results driven.