I think it’s been a little while since my last post, so I thought I’d toss something out there to our loyal readers (all three of you!). What have we been working on this week? Let’s see…

I pushed hard (maybe too hard) to get the new servers out of my house. The Foundation purchased two new servers and we’ve been trying to coordinate their installation for quite some time now. It finally looks like we have the correct address, contacts and coordination to get them put in. I should be able to, fingers crossed, get them out this weekend.

Let’s see, previous to that we had the big GNOME 3.0 release which overall went well. It put some pressure on some places, but that turned to be a good thing because we found where we could improve. Each time we’re pushed we learn one more thing about how we can streamline and improve our setup. It’s a good challenge, if anything.

I’m happy to say, after the initial tweaking, we stood up to slashdot which you might imagine is not a simple feat for many sites.

Ohh, a few more somewhat sysadmin related announcements have been in regards to the snowy project. If you’re not familiar with Snowy, think “Ubuntu One” but open source and specific to Tomboy. You can find out more here and here.

For now that’s all I’ve got. Signing off.

As you may have read, we’ve finally made the move to WP 3.1 and migrated from the WPMU installation to the integrated multi-site support in the mainline WordPress latest release. This happened yesterday afternoon, and other than some DNS propagation we didn’t anticipate any problems.

Well, it turns out that some of the caching plugins and configuration didn’t properly migrate / upgrade / function after the move so the server went down under heavy load over night. I spent some time this morning tweaking and monitoring, and tweaking again until I felt like the right caching solution was in place. It should now be applied to all blogs within the multi-site network, and should improve performance significantly.

During this monitoring and tweaking I was closely watching the error_log output for anything that might also need attention. There was one other thing that I found that needed attention. Outdated and unmaintained WordPress themes that were causing PHP Parse errors.

I spent some time trying to find upgraded versions for the themes, and updated where I could. There were three themes that I was unable to find updated versions for and so it was decided to clobber them entirely.

If you’ve found that your blog has suddenly reverted to the default theme, it is likely that you were using one of the outdated themes that had to be removed. My apologies. Please feel free to select a different theme or suggest a new theme for installation.

As usual, please accept our apologies for these service disruptions.