The server is back up and running, now under FreeBSD 6.2. First things first, I had forgotten how slow compiling packages is. And I’d forgotten about fun with dependencies. Getting the latest and greatest ports collection with portsnap was easy enough.

The first port I installed was vim and its installation led to a cascade of dozens of other packages that had to be installed first. Did you know that vim depends on the presence of Perl? Then of course it wanted to install GTK+ and that meant X11R6. Then it tried to install a package that has a known vulnerability, so it stopped the presses. (Yes, portaudit is really cool.) I found out that I hadn’t downloaded the latest and greatest index of ports yet, and that there’s a vim-lite package that leaves out all the X windows that’s not really needed when you just want to run vim in a shell.

I was also thrown briefly by the fact that FreeBSD doesn’t even have bash installed out of the box. The default shell under FreeBSD is csh, which is just awful. Fortunately that problem is easy to rectify.

Once I got my shell sorted out, my favorite editor installed, and a user created for myself, I installed the latest and greatest Postfix, Apache, PHP, MySQL, and so on. Installing ports is easy, as is rebuilding and reinstalling them, as I learned with Apache. I rebuilt Apache at least ten times, mainly trying to get suexec to work. I use suexec to enable Movable Type to write files to my Web directory without my having to make the whole thing world writable.

I had some minor mishaps with email. I never mess with my mail configuration, so every time I do anything to it I have to learn everything all over again. I forgot to install procmail, so Postfix couldn’t deliver email to the inboxes on the server. I copied the mail configuration from Fedora Core 4 and had to change up a bunch of stuff to get it to work. Eventually I did get mail working, but it was a chore.

Overall I’m quite happy with FreeBSD so far. I’m running PHP 5 and MySQL 5, two packages I couldn’t even get for Fedora Core 4. I’ve installed all of the Perl modules I’m using by way of the ports collection rather than the wretched CPAN interface. Movable Type seems more brisk than it ever did before, though I have no idea what would have made the difference there. I did have one problem with an old version of the PHP port of Markdown not working with PHP 5, but upgrading to the latest version took care of that.

I’m pretty excited to be running an operating system where I can play with the latest toys and still live within the confines of the operating system’s packaging system. Whether that leads to new, interesting features here remains to be seen.

My Web site is back, now running under FreeBSD. Getting everything configured correctly was a big pain, although that’s not FreeBSD’s fault. I’ll have a more detailed post later.

I’m going to get the server this site lives on reloaded sometime in the next 24 hours, so this site will be down from then until I get everything to work again. If worse comes to worst I’ll move everything to backup hosting, but lets hope it doesn’t come to that.

I didn’t know that Curse Gaming (the very popular site for World of Warcraft fans) runs Django. Looks like they’re wringing some serious performance out of it, too.

Google runs its own public transit system to get its employees to and from work in relative comfort. I had no idea.

Much hay has been made of the results of a recent poll that asked Muslims whether suicide bombings are justifiable. In the poll, 78% of Muslim Americans said that suicide bombing is never justifiable. FP Passport dug up a December 2006 poll which asked Americans whether intentionally bombing civilians is justifiable. Less than 50% of Americans believe that it’s never justifiable to intentionally target civilians.

I guess some forms of barbarism are less palatable than others.

YouNotSneaky! calculates how big a jerk you have to be to be anti-immigration. Here’s how he frames his thought experiment:

This kind of argument provokes the expected response from the expected folks, roughly along the lines that we should care more about native workers – the citizens – then the migrants – the non-citizens. Ok. But how much more? Let’s put on our annoying-economist hat and consider the question; if you consider a foreign national to be only 1/2 a human being (alright, alright, only 1/2 as “important”) as a native citizen, are you justified in opposing immigration? After all, it takes a real jerk to argue that foreign people’s welfare should not count at all. Suppose the foreigners are only 1/10th as important? Surely, if natives’ welfare counts for ten times as much as that of foreigners, we would be justified in banning immigration since it may adversely affect the wages of the unskilled in US? Well, let’s see…

Seeing how he arrives at an answer is more than half the fun, so I’ll leave it to you to follow the link. (Via Marginal Revolution)

It’s barely lunchtime and she’s already admitted to breaking the law. She’s still employed by the Justice Department as far as I know.

Update: Goodling resigned her position at the Justice Department in April.

In his Bible studies, David Plotz learns that the first documented encounter between Jews and Arabs presages everything that follows:

Let’s pause for a moment to observe the entrance of the Bible’s first, and I believe only, “Arab.” Arabia is referred to a few times in passing in various books, and anonymous “Arabians” are mentioned, but Geshem is the single named Arab. (Geshem is king of part of the Arabian Peninsula, according to a footnote in my Bible.) In what can be seen as a darkly humorous divine joke, the only Arab in the Bible turns out to be 1) an enemy of the Jews and 2) at odds with them over who should control Jerusalem. Given the poison between Arabs and Jews today, isn’t it appropriate that their relationship was born in strife?

The whole scene is almost too depressing—or too funny—to believe. Consider the first and only conversation between a Jew and an Arab. When Geshem and his cronies heard that Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall, they “mocked and ridiculed” him. Nehemiah responds by saying: “The God of heaven is the one who will give us success, and we His servants are going to start building; but you have no share or claim or historic right in Jerusalem” (emphasis added). That’s right, 2,500 years have passed, and it’s the same argument!

By the way, have I mentioned that the “blogging the Bible” series is hilarious, enlightening, and uniformly great? I’m certain Stephen Prothero would approve.

So I have a Web server running Fedora Core 4. That was the latest and greatest Fedora when I opened my hosting account, but now it’s slightly out of date. The Fedora project is up to version 6, and the stuff installed on my server no longer really gets updated. I’m not a systems administrator, and I’m not even qualified to pretend to be one in meetings, so I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with this situation.

I like having more recent software packages, but I don’t want to have to reload the OS on the server box frequently, both because it’s a huge pain and because I have to pay to have it done. Plus it causes a painful email outage.

It seems to me that my options are:

Keep Fedora Core 4, and when I want new stuff compile and install it myself, outside the OS packaging system. The problem is that I’m not going to maintain everything myself like that, and all of the packages that I don’t override will just get older. Also, then I’ll be in charge of keeping up with security updates for all of the packages that I compile and install on my own.

Have the box reloaded with CentOS. I’ll still have lots of old packages, but at least I’ll be using a distribution that is built around the idea of keeping old, stable packages around for a long time. I’ll still get security updates and so forth, but I’ll hardly be on the cutting edge.

Have the box reloaded with the stable version of Ubuntu (or Debian). I should then be able to keep up with the latest and greatest packages, and keep upgrading the distribution without dealing with OS reloads. The only downside here is that I’m not a Debian expert, nor do I know any Debian experts.

How do real systems administrators handle this problem?

Update: I think I’m going to have the server reloaded with FreeBSD. I’ve always liked the FreeBSD ports better than any Linux package management scheme.