If you’re into Urban Exploration I’ve been checking out a couple of good sites

Fallout-UE -This site probably has some of the most artistic photos I’ve seen yet. The Metro hospital and The Pines Hotel pictures are both work checking out. ( I really would have liked to have gone into the E before they gutted those two side buildings…or taken pictures back in `02 when the other side was demolished to make the gazebo.

Infiltration - An ezine filled with new reported locations, ethics of exploring and other resources for the interested to stay involved

Opacity - more locations

I was looking for known sites in Western KY and I did find something kinda cool. Two abandoned airports nearby that seem worth checking out. Who wants to come with?

Also, looking through some of these pictures has piqued my interest in digital photography. I’ve been doing some research on decent “starter” cameras…and I’m kind of looking forward to looking like an idiot and taking 50 million pictures of the exact same thing until I get the sense of what looks good =P

Geek Stuff.

I realized the other night I’d let my servers get a little dated…with the production release of FreeBSD 7.0 out I figured there was bound to be some security fixes which meant it’d be a good time to catch up. Before long, I realized it was nearing 8am and my first class (and that essay absolutely destroyed me, the rest of the test wasn’t bad though)

Getting done early, I decided to get on a computer and see how everything was going. Trying to SSH got me a timeout. Okay, maybe just sshd needs to be restarted locally.. Hm, can’t go to my web site? Try logging into my backup box.. uh-oh. Either there’s an outage in my area (unlikely) or something with portupgrade broke my router! ;)

As soon as I got home I saw my modem ready light was flashing…Turns out it was an outage and happened RIGHT in the middle of a php upgrade. make install clean ftw…

Okay…these couple of days have been pretty rough. Well, not really.. Just blah

Coming down with a nice little cold that’s kept me up most of the night..I don’t think I’m gonna be able to go to work at 10. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to get a little rest.

fredward.org was down for the past 2 days as I’ve upgraded my web server to a faster box. Hopefully they’ll be some improvement in load time. The reinstall went pretty smoothly except for the beginning. Setting up the firewall went without a hitch, I could ping out from the router but imagine my surprise when my clients couldn’t access the internet. Local traffic was fine so I knew their wasn’t a problem with the gateway…I spent about an hour looking through my fw.rules, using lynx to browse google etc.. Until I figured out there was a problem with my nameserver.. less than a minute later it’s fixed and good to go.

LOST is back and off to a very strong season so far. I’ve read somewhere that the Writers Strike is over…I hope so, and more importantly…I hope they start recording episodes of LOST..quickly! The way this season is shaping up, I really don’t want to get to the halfway point only to have to wait a couple of months.

I’m ridiculous amounts of tired right now in case you couldnt’ tell from the ranting and jumping back and forth…but when I try to lie down I just toss and turn…Me complaining about not being able to go to sleep. No Surprise There. It’s gotten better though, I’ve gotten calmer…Certain things don’t effect me the way they once did. Either that or I’ve finally realized that sleep is a treasure.. enjoy as much of it as possible

I did have an awesome dream though a couple of nights ago..Moved out to Washington State…I was a network security admin for some big telecom…Best part about my house was I had my little bomb cellar with a galaga machine in it. That’s seriously a goal for my dream house.

I’ve determined that hosting a web server (amongst other things) on a P2 300 isn’t the best idea. As long as the system is left alone everything runs smoothly…but, any compiling and everything about dies.

I have a PIII 900MHz w/ 512MB I’m thinking about switching everything over too. Plus, my current server hasn’t been fully wiped clean since FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE.

Which brings me to my next point, I was trying to think of something to do with this web site besides turn it into a personal blog so I’ll be adding a couple of techie sections to the list. I know every time I have to do a clean setup there is ALWAYS something I wind up forgetting or something doesn’t work right which sends me to Google. So, expect a few multi-topic tutorials in the upcoming week(s) I don’t know how in-depth I’m going to go yet but I have a couple of ideas

1.) Basic FreeBSD installation, typical system hardening and maybe automated maintenance

2.) BIND and Zone files… They both drove me insane so I’ll give a little backgroudn

3.) Apache, MySQL, PHP and including the best configure line to prevent constant recompiling

EDIT: Waiting for the release of FreeBSD 7.0 later this month

fredward.org is back, again. This time it’s being hosted on my personal server, Anaziah, running FreeBSD 6.2. It’s weird, I’ve been blogging for about…8 years now. One of my long term goals is to go through all of my old archives and upload them on here. I’ve setup wordpress a number of times but this time it was a little different as I had to get everything working with my apache install…apache isn’t one to give up control easily.

Anyway, this is a WIP and is going to be for some time. I hope to publish at least one entry of interest per week but we’ll see how well that stays up. I did get a small taste of the potential mod_rewrite has. I only used it for a simple redirect but reading through the docs showed me quite a bit it could do. But, for now I’m just going to play with the new version of wordpress, finish up a few things on my box and get going.

Oh, and this is also being hosted on a pretty slow box.. I’m not sure what kind of traffic restraints it can hold. Someone leave me a comment if it gets too bad ;)

So, the Pumpkins are releasing an EP at the first of the year…one of the songs on it was played at the show I went to. But, it’s on Itunes only…at least for now anyways. I’m sure they’ll release about four more versions of it

So, I’ve finally got the internet back at my apartment. I’ve spent most of the day updating all of my daemons to point to my new IP, in addition to patching, patching and then updating everything from where it’s sat.

Good news is my *@fredward.org e-mail accounts are working again