Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

Stalled by a Bad CD-R/DVD-R Drive

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I get ready to wipe my server clean and start installation but get hung up by bad hardware.

By Friday, I had all my Web sites moved over to GoDaddy.com. The LangerBooks.com site, which had been having problems since I initially set it up there on Monday, was not fixed by Friday. So I deleted the setup an started again. Within minutes, it was set up properly and ready to go. Over the weekend, the DNS change was propagated through the system. Just about every browser looking for one of the 18 domain names I host was pointing to the appropriate site on GoDaddy.com.

My e-mail is already hosted by GoDaddy.com. All my e-mail addresses use the theflyingm.com domain name and that domain has been hosted on GoDaddy for at least a year now. So I didn’t need to move any of my e-mail server stuff. Although it exists on my local server, nothing points to it.

There are only three things that remain hosted on my server:

(1) FileMaker Pro provides live access to searchable data. I’m running FileMaker Pro Server 6 on that machine, even though version 8 is current. I wrote all my Web-compatible routines using FileMaker’s CDML language, which is no longer supported by FileMaker Pro 8. So if I updated to the new version of the software, I might have to rewrite the Web interface. That’s not something I want to do. FileMaker also creates the static text ssi files I use on serveral sites. Those files are now put into place using AppleScripts that call Fetch into action. A cool solution, if I do say so myself. After I install the server, I’ll have to reinstall FileMaker Pro, including all the databases and CDML files that run with the Web sites. I’ll also have to reinstall Fetch and make sure the AppleScripts go in the right places. This should take about an hour.

(2) Nicecast is what gets KBSZ-AM radio on the Internet. It’s pretty much plug and play with just a few settings to tweak. I expect this to take about 20 minutes to reinstall.

(3) Evocam is what creates the Webcam image for wickenburg-az.com. It’s actually two images and a movie. It has FTP built right in. Reinstalling should be pretty straightforward.

One other piece of software runs on the server all the time. It’s called Audio Hijack Pro and its job is to automatically record and save certain broadcasts from KBSZ’s stream. For example, the 8 AM news report is available online every day after 8:20 AM. This is all automated: Audio Hijack Pro records the show and runs an AppleScript routine that uses Fetch to upload it to the appropriate directory on the KBSZ-AM Web site (now at GoDaddy.com). Likewise, Audio Hijack Pro records the daily “Around the Town” show and the first hour of the weekly “Rock-a-billy & Beyond Show.” (Starting tomorrow evening, it’ll also be recording my first radio show, “Classic Rock Cuts.” You can tune in online on Wednesday nights at 8 PM MST. I’m looking for sponsors; call KBSZ at 928/668-1250 during office hours to see how much bang you can get for $5 or $10 bucks. Make sure you tell Jo you want to advertise on my show, which will be podcast, too.)

So yesterday morning, I had a clear idea of what I needed to do and what files I needed to preserve from the server. I made copies of all the files I needed to preserve and put them in a folder that I’d use to create a CD. This would make it easy to load them all back in after I wiped the computer clean and reinstalled the software.

And that’s where I hit a brick wall. The CD burner wouldn’t work. It kept giving me error messages.

No problem. I used my network to move all the files over to my main production computer and created the CD there. Now I was all ready to install.

I put the Mac OS X 10.4 Server Unlimited Client DVD disc into my server computer and slid the drawer close. Then I waited expectantly for the disc icon to appear onscreen.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button to slide the disc in and out and in and out. Nothing. I pulled the disc out and put in the first install CD. (It comes on one DVD or a bunch of CDs; I’d rather use the DVD so I don’t have to switch discs.) Nothing happened.

I put the DVD into my production computer. It appeared onscreen just like it should.

Shit. I had a real hardware problem.

I blew canned air into the CD drive. Lots of dust flew around. Not good.

My office can be a very dusty place. Part of the problem is that a few years ago, some idiot decided to drive a perfectly good western business — the Big Corral horse boarding/riding facility — out of its downtown home and bulldoze all the trees, shrubs, and buildings off the property. In its place, the idiot planted a “For Sale” sign and erected part of an ugly chain link fence. To this day, the land lies open and barren, baking in the sun, supplying that side of town with all the dust it can handle. In my situation it’s a bit worse. I had some work done on the floors in my unit’s kitchen and bathroom and the sanding done by the floor guy sent more fine dust into the air than I thought possible. With a big fan on the back of each of my computers sucking air in, it’s no wonder they were filled with dust.

Of course, I’d already used the canned air on that computer. Just a few days before, I’d installed 512 MB of RAM. While the machine was wide open, I’d used the canned air on it and it was pretty clean. But I hadn’t dusted the drives.

Long story short, I couldn’t get the drive to work. And I didn’t have a spare. And the nearest Apple store didn’t have one. And Apple’s telephone support people told me a replacement drive would cost $354 with tax and shipping. But while I was waiting on hold to hear this bit of news, I discovered I could buy an external Firewire drive for about $100. Sheesh.

By this time, it was after 2 PM and too late to do any installation anyway. I figured I’d bring my new 80 GB external Firewire hard drive — the one I bought t help out my PowerBook — to the office, make a disk image of the DVD onto that, and use the disk image to install the server. If that didn’t work, I’d just buy an external CD-R for the computer and use that. Of course, all this was putting me back in schedule, but I really had no reason to rush. The Web sites were enjoying their new home and were paid up for 2 months.

Of course, I had to give the CD-R/DVD-R drive one last try at repair. So I went to the local hardware shop, bought a cheap ratchet screwdriver with a bunch of heads, and removed the drive from the computer. This was no easy task because although the computer opens easily enough, the CD drive and the Jaz drive I’d bought to go with it (and used about 4 times) were really jammed in there. Then, with the computer up and running without it — no reason to keep that software offline — I removed screws and protective plates until the optical lens and drive mechanism were revealed. I had to peel back two pieces of tape that were obviously in place to prevent the average user from doing what I’d done. I blew more air on it and moved the drive mechanism back and forth with my fingers. It didn’t look screwed up. Satisfied that I’d done all I could do, I put it all back together and stuffed it back into the computer. I fired it all back up and pressed the button to slide the drawer out.

The drawer wouldn’t slide out at all anymore. I’d mounted it a tiny bit too high and it was catching on the computer case.

So I opened up the computer while it was running and did what anyone else in my position would do: I banged on the top of the CD drive to nudge it down. The drawer slid open.

I stuck the DVD in there, fully realizing that that might be the last time I ever saw it. Then I slid the drawer back in.

Would you believe it? It worked!

I couldn’t believe that it was really reading the DVD as well as it was, so I decided to test it by starting the computer from the DVD. That worked, too.

Of course, I didn’t really want to install the software then. It was after 3 PM and I didn’t feel like tackling the installation that late in the day. So I restarted from the hard drive and let all that software come up and run again.

But now I have my work ready for me today.

Moving Web Sites

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I begin my server project by finding temporary homes for the 18 domains I host.

Rather than try to rush through the server configuration and get it done in a day, I decided to take my time about it. As a result, my Web server is likely to be down for several weeks.

Of course, I can’t keep my Web sites down for several weeks. Although most of the 18 domains I own are mine and support my own personal business endeavors, more than a few are for other people’s businesses. These are businesses I’ve created Web sites for as favors or in return for other goods or services. Although I’m not being paid to maintain the sites, I don’t feel that I have the right to cut them off for a few weeks. And for the few sites I do receive income for, I obviously owe my clients uninterrupted service.

The solution, of course, was to move the sites onto another server for a month or so. I chose GoDaddy.com, which offers inexpensive, feature-rich Web hosting that includes lots of bandwidth and disk space for a very reasonable monthly fee. GoDaddy also has very good customer service by phone (the e-mail based customer service stinks and is not worth the effort). Best of all, I had already registered most of the domain names on GoDaddy.com, so setting up the sites to be hosted there would be quick and easy.

Easy, yes; quick, well, not really. For each domain, I had to set up and pay for a hosting account. GoDaddy no longer allows just one-month hosting contracts; there’s a minimum of two months. That’ll give me more time but cost me about twice what I thought I’d pay. Not a huge deal, because the prices are very affordable. Then I had to tell GoDaddy what domain was being hosted at the new site, thus setting up a new FTP account on the server. I had to go to my domain list and change the DNS settings for that domain so they’d point to GoDaddy’s DNS server.

The big trick was to get the site files to the new server before anyone would be visiting. Normally, I’d use ftp with the domain name (for example, ftp.aneclecticmind.com) with the login settings to connect. But since I’d just changed the DNS server settings, using ftp with the domain name would have pointed me to the server in my office. I had to wait for the domain to be fully propagated through the DNS system to find it using the domain name. So instead, I figured out how to track down the IP address of the new server and I used that for FTP. It worked like a charm. I was able to upload all the site files to the new server so they’d be there when the first visitors arrived.

I had to go through this process for most of my domain names. I say most because a few domain names are for the same site. For those, I tweaked the DNS settings on GoDaddy.com to set up domain forwarding. For example, wickenburgaz.com and wickenburg-az.us point to wickenburg-az.com. This saves me money, of course, because I don’t have to set up a separate hosting account for each of the wickenburg-az.com domain names. To save time, effort, and money, I had a few other domains point to existing domains. For example, I also pointed flyingmproperties.com and wickenburgairport.com to wickenburg-az.com. Although these are separate sites, they’re small and don’t really need to be separate for the next few months.

I was doing fine until I got to langerbooks.com. During the hosting account setup process, GoDaddy’s server had some kind of hiccup and gave me an error message. As a result, the hosting account is set up, but the domain manager there doesn’t recognize the domain as being hosted on GoDaddy. That means I can’t change the DNS settings to GoDaddy’s DNS server. Which means that although the langerbooks.com site is all ready to be visited on GoDaddy’s server, no one will ever find it there because the DNS still points to my server. This is a royal pain in the butt that I’ve been tackling with GoDaddy tech support for the past four days. They say the problem effected several users, and is being worked on, but nothing seems to be getting done. If it isn’t fixed by tonight, I’ll have them delete the hosting account and I’ll start all over.

The only other challenge was for the one site I host that I don’t control the domain name for so I couldn’t easily access the DNS settings. Actually, there are two of those. One of the domains is registered on GoDaddy.com, so it was just a matter of setting myself up as an administrator (or “exec” for the account) and making the DNS change. The other is registered with Network Solutions, which I definitely do not recommend (despite what I wrote in a book several years ago). Network Solutions overcharges for domain name registration — they cost roughly 4 times what GoDaddy does — and they don’t offer nearly as many features, options, or services. But they’re also very difficult to get your domain name away from and my client, who owns the domain, would rather overpay for domain registration than try to tackle the change process. It’s his money. I’ll try again later this month to show him the light.

Anyway, I had to go to his office, where his office manager logged into his account on Network Solutions so I could make the change. It only took a few minutes. I expect the DNS to be fully propagated by the weekend.

The next task was to change where the ssi ini files were being copied to. These files are generated each morning by FileMaker Pro. There are four of them. almanac.ini displays information about the sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and length of day for the current day and the next day. This information is used by wickenburg-az.com and wickenburgairport.com. sunrise.ini displays sunrise information for the next seven days. sunset.ini displays sunset information for the next seven days. These two files are used by flyingmair.com to display current information for its Sunrise and Sunset tours. calendar.ini displays information about the next event on the wickenburg-az.com event calendar and is used on the wickenburg-az.com home page.

These files are created on my Web server computer and just saved in the appropriate Web folder. But now the files needed to be sent via FTP to the servers where the sites resided. I used an AppleScript to give the instructions to Fetch. FileMaker Pro would trigger the script when it finished generating the files. I just checked it and it doesn’t seem to be working quite right. I’ll have to check it again when I go into the office later today.

The only other change was to set where the webcam images would be saved and make sure the sites would point to the right place. I decided to send all the Webcam images to theflyingm.com, which will continue to be hosted on GoDaddy.com’s servers. I use that domain name for all my podcasts, book sample files, and other large files I don’t want to host locally. The connection is faster and there’s tons of bandwidth and disk space available. It’s a great deal.

So that’s where the project stands so far. The only thing holding me up from taking the next step is the problem I mentioned with langerbooks.com, which will be resolved, one way or another, this weekend.

I’ve done a few other things with the server. I added 512 MB of RAM the other day. I’d tried this two weeks ago, but the RAM I bought was bad. This was the replacement RAM, sent for free from the dealer, All4Memory. I recommend them.

Since I had all that RAM on board, I set up another program to work for me. Audio Hijack Pro is now set up to record the incoming streaming audio from KBSZ. It’ll record the 8 AM news (for immediate and automatic distribution at 8:20 AM), the 9 AM Around the Town show (which will require some tweaking to convert into a podcast), and the first hour of Miss Holley King’s Rock-a-Billy & Beyond show on Saturday mornings (which will also be converted into a podcast). This will save me a ton of time; I won’t have to transfer Around the Town episodes from cassette tape to my computer.

I’m having a lot of fun thinking up things for my server to do for me. I hope to have only one day of server down time — probably Monday of next week — before I start rebuilding the server from the bottom up.

Got ideas, comments, suggestions? Use the comments link or form.

The Server Project Begins

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I [finally] get Mac OS X 1.4 Server and start to plan for installation and deployment.

If you’ve been following this bLog, you know that I recently purchased Mac OS X 10.4 Server from someone on eBay. I got the software at a smoking price — less than the Apple employee discount, in fact — and considered myself very fortunate. The only thing I can’t figure out is why it took the seller more than 10 days to send the software to me in a flat rate Priority Mail box.

The software arrived in good condition. The box looked a little worn, as if it had been handled by too many people or shuffled around from one shelf to another. But the seals were intact and the box appears to contain all the discs, documentation, and proof of purchase info — including the all-important serial number — that a legal copy of the software should. So I’m pretty confident that I did not buy used or pirated software.

Now that I have the software, I have no excuse to put off my big server project.

The goal, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is to install Mac OS X 10.4 server on my current Web server machine and use the following features:
– Web server (Apache) with PHP and MySQL for dynamic content
– E-mail server
– Mailing List server
– FTP server
– Streaming Video (QuickTime)
– Blog

I’ll also set up secure space on the server to back up my own personal documents, as well as Mike’s.

In addition to all that, the server will continue to run the same other services the server runs now:
– FileMaker Pro databases
– Webcam
– Steaming Audio (for KBSZ-AM)

All this on a Power Macintosh G4 running at 866 MHz. Seems pretty ambitious, but we’ll see how I can do. If all else fails, I’ll take my old G3/300 (beige, mind you) out of retirement and use that for the Webcam and FileMaker Pro databases.

I’ve made a list of steps that need to be done to get the project going. Here’s what I hope to accomplish today:

1) Adjust the upload address for all Webcams. Although the KBSZ-AM Webcam currently uploads to some GoDaddy hosting space I have, I think the wickenburg-az.com and Editor SpyCam Webcams both upload to my current server. I need them to upload someplace that won’t be affected by the change — probably that GoDaddy space — so I don’t lose Webcam service. I also need to adjust all Web page references to that new space.

2) Adjust the file locations for the ini files I use to display sunrise/sunset and upcoming event info on various Web sites. This information is generated each morning as a text file that is inserted in the appropriate locations on various Web pages. I need to change the source location for the ini files in the Web page HTML and then set up an AppleScript that automatically uses Fetch to move the files where I said they’ll be right after the files are created.

3) Set up hosting on the GoDaddy server for the Web sites I host on my server. This is temporary and will give me the time I need to make all the changes on the new server before moving the sites back. Some sites will move over without any major changes. Other sites, like wickenburg-az.com and aneclecticmind.com will undergo complete facelifts using new features available to me in Apache and the blogging software that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 Server. By moving them off my server to a place where they’ll continue to be served without interruption, I won’t be rushed to build the new sites. Some will be at GoDaddy for less than a month; others might be there for several months.

Since it’ll take up to 48 hours for the DNS info on the Web site move to propogate, I’ll have to wait a few days after I finish these steps to move onto the next step. Hopefully, while I’m waiting, the new RAM will arrive. I’d already ordered and installed 512 MB of RAM on the server and quickly discovered that the RAM was bad. When I get the new RAM, I’ll install it and send back the bad RAM. It should arrive today. If this RAM doesn’t work, I can only assume that they sold me the wrong kind of RAM.

When I’m sure that the sites are being served from GoDaddy’s servers, I can move on with the next steps in the project. I’ll write about those later on.

Stay tuned for progress reports, including problems I’m sure to encounter. And wish me luck!

Snagged the Server!

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Another eBay success.

I managed to win an auction for a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. Apple sells this for $995; I got it for $449 including shipping. According to the seller, it’s in an unopened box, so it sounds legal to me.

I’m excited about this. I’ve been sitting on the fence about switching to Mac OS X server for about two years now, but my recent dealings with the folks who sell WebSTAR made me decide to take the big step up. I run a bunch of Web sites on the G4 in my office. I also run a FileMaker Pro database Web publishing server, Webcam software, and audio streaming software.

I used to run e-mail there, too, but the IP address I had was somehow linked to a spam account and all my e-mail was getting bounced from the sender as spam. What a hassle that was. So I moved my theflyingm.com domain name to a GoDaddy.com server and use that for e-mail and hosting my podcasting files. Although I now have a different IP address, I think I’ll keep theflyingm.com on GoDaddy’s server. They offer a ton of bandwidth for a very affordable price.

Now, I need to come up with a plan of attack for the new server. I want to take my time about setting it up, so I’ll probably start by moving all the Web sites I host over to GoDaddy.com for a month. Then I’ll set up my new server’s features, step-by-step, and get the Web sites all in place. I’ll “flick the switch” back to my server and, with luck, there won’t be any service interruption at all.

Those of you reading this who don’t know about GoDaddy.com and have a need for domain name registration or Web site hosting should really check them out. They’re affordable and reliable and have excellent free technical support by phone. (E-mail tech support stinks.) They also have a lot of how-to documents on the site to answer the easy questions.

Speaking of how-to documents, I got an answer to my MIME Mapping question that pointed me to a file named .htaccess. A Google search got me the information I needed from the JavaScriptKit Web site’s Web Building Tutorials pages. I think this will be a gold mine of information for me as I work directly with a Unix-based Web server for the first time.

As I work my way through this project, I’ll probably report my progress here and provide detailed how-to information in the companion Web site for my Mac OS books — that’s where most readers interested in this kind of stuff are mostly likely to look for how-to information from me.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt this excited about a computer project for a long time. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and to learning the new things that’ll make it all work.

Oh, and the good news is that I didn’t win the other hard disk auction.

MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, eBay Shopping

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Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping. This episode is a hodgepodge of information related to my podcasting efforts and the trouble it has been giving me lately. You can find the transcript of this podcast in the “Call Me a Geek” area of Maria’s WebLog. The easiest way to find that is to click the link on my home page, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Let’s start with the MPEG-4 lessons. If you’ve been following my podcasts, you know that I’ve begun creating the occasional enhanced podcast. Enhanced podcasts include images and links and are saved in MPEG-4 format with a .m4a extension. My other podcasts are saved in MP3 format with a .mp3 extension.

Podcast publishing is not exactly a simple task — well, not when you do it the way I do. After recording, editing, and saving the audio file, I then log into Blogger where I create a blog entry for the podcast. There’s a link field that I fill out with the URL for the audio file’s location on a server. I put a short blurb about the episode in the entry and publish it.

Publishing the entry on Blogger does two things. First, it creates the Maria Speaks home page. That’s the plain old Web page you see when you browse www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks. Then it creates an XML feed file called atom.xml, in the same location as the home page. This feed file has all the codes necessary for podcatching software — like iTunes and a bunch of others I really don’t know — to see and download the new audio files.

But that’s not what most subscribers use to access my podcast. They use my Feedburner feed. Every 30 minutes or so, Feedburner’s software checks out my atom.xml file to see if it has changed. If it has, it revises its version of my xml feed file, which can be found at feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks. That’s the file most subscribers subscribe to and it’s the one with all the bells and whistles to make sure my podcast entries appear correctly in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere.

Sound confusing? It is, in a way. But I don’t usually have to deal with too much of it. As I said, I create and save the audio file, then create and publish the corresponding blog entry. Blogger, Feedburner, and subscriber’s software does the rest.

My MPEG-4 lesson started yesterday. Well, in all honestly, it started about four months ago, but I didn’t realize it then. Back then, it was a problem getting my podcasts to work. But I changed the way I was doing things and it started to work, so I assumed I’d been doing it wrong in the first place. Actually, I wasn’t.

Here’s the symptom: my enhanced podcasts weren’t accessible from the Maria Speaks podcast. Anyone trying to access the file from the Maria Speaks home page by clicking the entry name got an error message. File not found. And there was no attachment to either version of the xml feed file.

The regular podcasts were fine.

Thus began my troubleshooting exercise. I zeroed in on the difference in the file name extensions and started researching. To make a long story short, I discovered that in order for me to include m4a files in my podcasts, I had to set up a MIME mapping on the server to identify the m4a extension’s type as audio/MPEG.

If you’re completely lost, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the kind of thing most computer users need to deal with. I certainly don’t. Fortunately, I have a server in my office that I can set up MIME mapping. I added the appropriate entry, moved my m4a files over to that server, fixed the URLs in Blogger, republished, resynced Feedburner, and everything began working fine.

I’m still trying to find out if the server space I have on GoDaddy.com can be modified to add the MIME mapping I need there. I’d much rather serve from that server than the one in my office.

So that was my MPEG-4 lesson.

Server woes started this morning. I was still fiddling around with the MPEG-4 files and was very surprised to see that the folder on my GoDaddy server that I’d been using to store my MP3 files was gone. I mean gone like it was never there. And oddly enough, two folders that I thought I’d deleted were back. What the heck was going on?

I assumed that I’d accidentally deleted the missing folder and was mistaken about the other two folders. After all, I’ve been busy lately with my QuickBooks book and a bunch of unexpected helicopter charters. I was obviously being careless. So I rebuilt the missing folder from backup files on my iDisk and went to work.

All the way to work — it’s a ten-minute drive — I thought about my carelessness. And when I got to my office, I did some more research. What I soon realized was that all of the space on my GoDaddy server had been reverted to the way it looked on October 10. Over a month ago. What the heck was going on?

I called GoDaddy technical support and was fortunate enough to have a tech guy answer right away. I told him the symptoms. We did some brainstorming, using the info we both had. We soon discovered that on October 10, I’d requested a change from a Windows server to a Linux server. For some reason, it had taken GoDaddy five weeks to process the change. In the meantime, I kept uploading files to the Windows server when the Linux server was already set up but not accessible to my account. Last night, GoDaddy switched my access to the Linux server, which hadn’t been updated since I requested the change. So I was suddenly faced with a server that hadn’t been updated for five weeks and access to the server I’d been using all along was completely cut off.

Well, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I was using the server space for a Web site. I keep backup copies of all my Web site on my main production computer. If a Web site’s directory or disk is trashed, I can have it replaced in a matter of minutes. But the only thing I use this server for is storing my podcasting files. Not just for Maria Speaks but for KBSZ-AM’s Around the Town radio show, which is broadcast every weekday. When GoDaddy made its change, it wiped out about 20 podcast files.

The really tragic part of all this is that I’d been saving all those podcast audio files on my PowerBook’s hard disk. Two days ago, I got an onscreen message saying I was running out of disk space. Well, why not delete some of those podcasts, I asked myself. After all, I can always get new copies from the server.

Two days later, of course, I couldn’t.

Well, the GoDaddy tech guy was very helpful. He told me they’d do a server restore for the Windows server and copy the files in my directory there to the Linux server. Although GoDaddy usually charges $150 for this service, they admitted that they were at least partially at fault for the screw-up and waived the fee. Now I just have to wait up to 10 days for the files to reappear. And, when that happens, I have to re-upload any files I uploaded to the server between yesterday at midnight and the day the server is restored. Like this podcast.

Oh, and I did lose one of my enhanced podcast episodes. It was one of my better ones, too: Mac and Windows File Sharing. It was on my .

Mac disk space, which I also cleaned up in an effort to get rid of unneeded files. So if you have a copy of it — that’s the version with the m4a file extension — please send it to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’d really like to put it back online for the latecomers here. The lesson I learned in this ordeal is that I must have a copy of every single file I want to make available on a server. If I’d had all my files, I could have just restored the server back to its original condition and got on with my life. And not bore you with this story.

SmartDiskWhat’s weird about this is that I considered the server my backup and I deleted the originals, depending on the backup. If you recall my famous NaNoWriMo podcast episode, you’ll remember how I spoke about the importance of backups. Yeah, well the originals are important, too. Which brings me to the final topic of this podcast: eBay shopping. I’ve been surfing eBay for the past two weeks, trying to get a deal on a portable FireWire hard disk. The idea is to use the external hard disk to store all my media files, thus keeping them off my PowerBook’s internal hard disk, which is only 40GB. SmartDisk makes a drive called the FireLite and I figure I can get an 80GB model for about $130. There’s plenty to choose from, all in unopened boxes. But I seem to have the worst timing; I’ve lost about a dozen auctions in the past two weeks. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually bid on two of them at a time, knowing I can’t possibly win both.

That’s the same technique I used to snag a new iSight camera this week. I put the same bid on both cameras. I won one and lost the other. Fine with me. I figure I’ll bring the camera home and use it on my laptop for a Webcam and for iChat. I might also do some video podcasting — but don’t hold your breath on that.

My other big eBay acquisition is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. It’s about half the price on eBay as it is in the Apple Store. Sealed boxes, unregistered. Sounds almost too good to be true. We’ll see.

The server, of course, is so I can finally get rid of WebSTAR and do some serious Web hosting on my server. I’ll bore you with that in another blog entry.

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something from this mess. Thanks for listening!