This server should last me another year and then I think it will be time for another upgrade. My plan is to upgrade my desktop machine to something multi-core, probably an i7 in the next 6-8 months; maybe sooner if the taxes work out in my favor. I’m hoping there’s a price drop coming as the next batch of chips hit the market. When that happens, my desktop will move to become a server. Even though it’s old, it’s faster and has more RAM than the current server. Clearly I’m not a cutting edge kind of guy. I get every ounce of use out of my machines before I upgrade.

I’ll be shopping the Dell site in the next few months to see what my meager budget will afford me.

Instead of leaving the kids at home and heading out for a $100 evening, we decided to stay home and put together that same dinner for less than $30 and everyone got to enjoy it. For Valentine’s Day we decided to bring out the fondue pot and create our own little feast. It actually turned out exceptionally well with all of us sitting around the table talking and eating for nearly two hours. That alone was worth every penny.

I have a fondue pot which uses Sterno cans to keep it hot. This actually works quite well overall, but I wanted to get the main broth as hot as possible and give it time to simmer. With that in mind I put the broth on the stove while we enjoyed the choose dip.

Beef Broth:

To make the main fondue broth, combine the following in a saucepan:

1 ½ cups red wine (Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Burgundy, etc). Brand and vintage aren’t important.
1 cup of water
1 packet French Onion soup mix
1 beef bouillon cube

Bring to a boil and then let simmer until you’re ready for it.

The cheese mixture is just as simple but very tasty. I did this in the fondue pot itself since it probably wouldn’t pour very well and the cheese only takes a few minutes to melt. The actual quantities will vary slightly depending on how many people you have. But here is the base.

Cheese Dip:

In the fondue pot combine the following:

4-8oz of beer (I used Corona)
1 – 1 ½ cups of shredded of cheese – 4 cheese Mexican blend
1 large jalapeno pepper, seeded and diced

Pour in some of the beer and stir in the cheese. Keep adding cheese and beer to the desired amount and consistency. It should be smooth and creamy. It should be thin enough to coat the bread when dipped.

For the bread I actually made a loaf of French bread in my bread machine. This works out well because the bread is dense so it holds up well on the skewer and the crust is excellent for dipping on its own. You have to plan ahead though as French bread takes 4 hours from start to finish.

Once the bread it ready simply cut off the crust and cut the inner portion into 1 inch cubes. Don’t toss the crust, it’s great for dipping on its own.

To have a good time with fondue you really only need a couple of things, the broth, a cheese dip, a thick bread and of course your main course ingredients. The main course can be anything you want. I chose chicken breasts, steak strips, salmon filet, russet potato wedges, large whole mushrooms, and broccoli florets. Cut everything into cubes and place them on a platter. Everyone can then take what they like as needed. For the dipping sauces you can use whatever comes to mind. Ranch, honey mustard, bbq sauce, lemon pepper, Louisiana Red Pepper sauce, etc all work very well, are readily available and don’t cost much.

For the main course I cut up the following:

2 8oz boneless, skinless chicken breasts
2 4-6oz salmon filets
2 4-6oz steak strips (pretty much any cut will do)
1 head of fresh broccoli florets
Several large mushrooms
2-3 medium russet potatoes cut into cubes

French Bread Loaf:

2 pound loaf:

1 and 1/3 cups water
2 teaspoons margarine or butter
4 cups bread flour
5 teaspoons sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 and 1/2 teaspoons yeast

And there you have, a very inexpensive way for the whole family to enjoy Valentine’s Day and spend some real quality time with each other. This is a very simple recipe but it’s a great place to get started and it tastes very good. I’m looking forward to the next time we try this one out.

If you have a fondue recipe you would like to share please leave a comment, I would love to hear about it.

But over the Christmas break I put together a new server, using a more powerful even though somewhat dated machine. The original machine is a PIII 700mhz with a gig of ram.

Go ahead and laugh. The machine was kick ass back in 2000 when I built the thing. Dual processors and 1GB of ram was a rarity in those days. Now cellphones and DVD players have as much processing power.

I have leftover machine parts all over the place, so it was easy to bring up another machine. I chose an Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz machine as my new server. Go ahead and laugh again, but I’m not trying to build some crazy scalable datacenter used by hundreds of people. I just want a blog and a place to host images, so this will be more than adequate.

Since the machine is EIDE, (you remember that format right?) I have several extra drives which I can use with it. The boot drive is 80GB and I gave it a backup drive of 120GB. And since I can buy old EIDE drives for the cost of gum, I have plenty of hardware for this rig.

It was light on the memory so I ordered up 2GB of ram which just arrived last night. I spent the break installing Windows 2003 Server Web Edition (same as the current server) and transferring everything over.

Windows 2003 is already several years old so it would be cool to use Windows 2008, but since I don’t actually have Windows 2008 yet I didn’t use it. And since the hardware I’m using is closer to 2003 vintage it seemed a better idea to match up the hardware with the OS. No reason to get the sexy new OS and put on old hardware. That would be like sticking a hot bikini model in a Pinto. You might be able to make that word, but what are you going to get out of the deal?

While it may not be uber powerful with quad or even dual cores, I should get at least two years worth of service out of this rascal before I feel the need to upgrade again. The server has actually been running or a couple days now and it looks like things are going pretty well. And by well I mean nothing has crashed.

2009 will kick off with a brand new server that has 4 times the power of the original machine. It may be old and certainly won’t raise any eyebrows for it’s processing power, it will keep things running along very nicely. And I did all of this with about 1 minute of downtime as I switched the network cables over and put the new ram in last night. Didn’t notice anything did ya? I’m stealthy like that!

There are changes galore on the site, but I bet you won’t see a single one of them! I realized I need to fix all the gallery pages with the correct titles and descriptions. I spent who knows how long setting them all to the correct display information. It really has nothing to do with how you see the site, and more to do with seducing the Googlebot to index this site correctly. It’s kind of hard to get the right keywords when everything says “picture gallery” in it.

Here’s to hoping the site doesn’t come crashing down around me again!

Two days ago I ran into a slight issue with the server. I woke up in the morning as I always do. As part of my routine, I checked email and did a quick check on my other computers to make sure they are happy and ready to face the day.

The server gave me the impression it wasn’t ready to handle another day. This was confirmed by the fact the computer was locked up and I couldn’t click on anything. I tapped on the monitor to let the computer know it was time to wake up and face the day. None of us wanted to do it, but we had to. It was just one of those things.

The server wanted no part of this and remained locked up. Realizing I had ultimate power in the tip of my finger, I used this destructive weapon to turn the machine off. It went dark. “Ha!” I chided, “We’ll see whose Uber Powerful in this house my friend!”

Since the computer was off it was unable to make any sort of reply which really deflated my feeling of superiority.

I turned the computer back on. It still wasn’t ready to work.

Off it went again.

Perhaps the server had been engaged in a long night of partying with the other machines in the house behind my back and just wasn’t sober enough to get things moving today. I let it sit some more.

I ignored the server with impunity for a good 10 minutes until I felt it was time to go back to work. The server realized I was a force to be reckoned with and started back up.

That’s when things really got bad. And not Michael Jackson Bad. More of a Britney Spears Bad, where you really have to wonder just what the heck’s going on.

A quick trip to the Event Viewer showed signs of red. Red stop signs everywhere and just like in real they were annoying. Errors with the drive all over the place. I sprung into action like some half dressed super hero and made a back up of the data. Obviously since I lost the blog entry I didn’t get it all. I didn’t have time to be all caring and Doogie Howser with the server so I gave it the Greg House once over and salvaged what I could. Then I brought in the bug guns. Not literally big guns, shooting the server would be rather dangerous and I could hit by flying plastic shards. I cloned the boot drive.

Unbeknownst to me, this would take 4 hours. Had I read the manual I may have realized this little nugget of information before I started, but this is war Peacock, and sacrifices have to be made!

After I cloned the drive I restarted the server to see if the drive really was bad. I mean it could have been just a simple glitch or software snafu. We all know that Windows Server is fool proof so blaming the software would be a foolish long shot, but sometimes these things happen.

I didn’t get any errors with the chkdsk or another other drive analysis tool so I thought everything was OK and that Windows had just had a moment of insanity but had cleared its thoughts and was now going to get back to the business at hand of serving up my web pages.

And it did, for about a day. And that’s when we hit the iceberg.

At around 8:30pm the server completely went downhill and got itself into such a state I had no choice but to swap drives. With its innards splayed about the floor I removed the drive and popped in the new ones. I didn’t have time to scrub up; I just went in there to save the patient.

5 minutes later a new drive was in and the server was back online. Who knew you could clone Windows Server 2003 like that?

So now the server is back online with a new boot drive in place ready to face the world. Hopefully we won’t have anymore nights like that, especially since I’ve run out of replacement drives.

Here’s to wishful thinking!

I’m not taking any more chances and like a celebrity being kicked off the stage at the awards ceremony, the drive has been taken out and replaced. The swap took about 5 minutes but I have no idea how long the server was down when I finally found it. It was in quite the state of confusion so I just shut it down.

Once again, all is well for now. We’ll see if this drive can keep the server running without causing a scene. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to need an old priest and a young priest.

You can read the Microsoft article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931836

You can download the update here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/f/a/afa62de4-b20d-44af-8548-c0e3b335f370/WindowsXP-KB931836-x86-ENU.exe

It only takes a second and then the time will adjust correctly.

If you need help, let Peter Guy point you in the right direction. As I said I didn’t use all the steps, but it was worth checking to make sure the PHP DLL’s were loaded within IIS.

As for Wordpress, the only snag I hit, was to make sure I created the Wordpress database. It didn’t make it by default so I had to use the command:

create database Wordpress;

After that, everything went fine. And if you’re from the Windows world like I am, remember the default account is ROOT, not Administrator. I kept on typing in the wrong username and password and cursing MySql for not being the easy to use database tool that the Internet had lead me to believe, until the Mrs. (who is a real SQL DBA) told my to knock of my shenanigans and type in the right information.