Sometimes all good things come to an end. There aren’t too many links going into either of these sites, but I’d like to redirect all of them to a page on my blog saying the website doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve already created simple screendumps for nostalgic purposes with the Firefox plugin Screengrab!, so the remaining simple server-side steps are: Edit the DNS records from the live server to the server with the notice page is on. Create a new vhost on the server the notice exists on, add old websites as ServerAlias. Add a redirect in the vhost to the notice about the retired sites. Reload apache config. The below vhost entry will redirect any link to the retired sites to the notice …

I realized a few of my log files were growing unusually large, and even worse, logrotate was skipping them. I took a look in logrotate.d and straight away realized why: I had created silly names for the log file. logrotate look for .log files, but I had specified mine as .log – e.g. kelvinism_access_log. I was as familiar with logrotate when I set up the domains, so set forth to get them in the rotation.

This is the laundry list of things I did while creating a mod_tile VMware appliance based on Ubuntu Server 8.04. I’ve kept descriptions limited but left all the commands in. Let’s start installing things… Useful goodies for compiling source sudo apt-get build-essential More goodies for Mapnik + Friends sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-filesystem1.34.1 libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-iostreams1.34.1 libboost-program-options-dev libboost-program-options1.34.1 libboost-python-dev libboost-python1.34.1 libboost-regex-dev libboost-regex1.34.1 libboost-serialization-dev libboost-serialization1.34.1 libboost-thread-dev libboost-thread1.34.1 libicu-dev libicu38 …