Site temporarily b0rked

I upgraded piggy (the machine running this site) before leaving for the UK. After upgrading, I also ran a dist-upgrade on my Debian distribution since it was long overdue, and I was already in the upgrading mood.In doing so, I managed to really mess up Movable Type and was unable to throw any blog entries out to the world from the UK. (Don't worry, you didn't miss anything.)So piggy is now powered by a Celeron 2.0Ghz and 256MB of DDR. Quite a step up from the PII-300 that it once was. The new CPU and RAM (stolen from beaker – the PowerMac G4 tower) are overkill for most of what piggy does, but when I push hard, it can handle what I dish out.The old piggy was hanging on by a hair in terms of stability. Downloads that took longer than a minute would often lock the machine up (it's serving my pppoe connection), and sometimes I'd get some strange behavior out of the blue when accessing the pages it serves. All gone since the upgrade…What finally pushed me over the edge to dive in and upgrade was a pretty sweet deal that got me a Soyo P4VGA motherboard (with on-board everything – great for a server) for $7 CDN after rebate. The deal has since gone away (it's more than $40 after the rebate now, and the starting price went from $70 to about $120). I think I will continue to TigerDirect.ca now that I've received two orders without any incidents, and both at good prices.Unfortunately, my lack of a fully-functioning brain meant that I could not use the new mainboard and CPU until I bought a proper P4-compatible 12V ATX power supply, which I decided to buy locally. The one I ended up with is very quiet, and I'm super-happy about that. Now my G4 tower is the louder of the two computers in the room (which is pretty quiet compared to most other computers I've used).After the install, I realized that the chipset on this mainboard isn't super-friendly with linux, so I had to (un-)tweak the kernel a bit to remove the APIC support. Not a huge deal, but it was a pain in the arse for about 3 hours of recompiling the kernel and swapping hardware trying to figure out why my network cards were not getting interrupts. Boo-urns to the linux kernel folk for not fixing VIA chipset support yet…Oh yeah. I used my VGA-LCD screen during the whole process. By the end, my custom PCB was pretty much dead (stupid design work on my part) but it survived the upgrade long enough for me to get piggy to an ssh-able state. I should probably take a picture of the board before I rip it to pieces again, so you can see what a mess it became by the end of its life. It was almost to the point where I was just jumpering every signal due to the traces going to hell.