I installed Google Analytics as I’ve heard some good things about it. If I don’t like it after a few days I’ll simply remove it. In the meantime, if you do not want to be tracked by Google simply reject all cookies from my domain.
Based on the encouragement I received to my previous post I installed OpenBSD on the 250 again and this time I compiled a multi processor enabled kernel from current and it worked! So now I’m back on OpenBSD again and it feels great. 
I also found that the AR5212 WiFi chipset is one of the supported chipsets in OpenBSD and as it happens I bought a D-Link DWL-G520 a couple of years ago that hasn’t been doing any good ever so I decided to install it in the 250. A huge Sun machine with a small WiFi antenna on the back looks kind of cool in my opinion. Sadly the ath is not as stable as I had hoped so it will have to be left disabled for the time being. So no replacing the Linksys just yet.
There is of course also the possibility that it is caused by a problem in -current, I’ll just have to wait and see.
MySQL seems to require a significant amount of processing power as it is a constant bottleneck when servicing pages from Wordpress. There is a very noticable latency whenever I load anything dynamic that requires data from the db whereas other pages come up instantly. I guess I’ll have to dig through the MySQL documentation on how to optimize it. Especially considering that at the time being it is very memory conservative, much more than it need be.
I installed OpenBSD 4.2 on the Sun Enterprise 250 two days ago but after having fiddled around with it a bit I realized that it didn’t come with SMP support for SPARC64. That is a huge shame because I really like OpenBSD and it felt like the perfect fit for this machine but I can’t have one CPU sitting there unutilized.
So then I went on to install Solaris 10 on it which turned out to not work at all, probably due to the Permedia Raptor (GFX-8P) not being supported. I downloaded the Solaris 9 distribution instead, thank god it hasn’t reached eol yet.. Solaris 9 worked better but after installing a bare system I realized it pretty much expects you to make a full install in order to get the management console and what not. Why do I need X11, CDE and a whole other bunch of crap just to run a web server?
After this slight disappointment I decided to give Linux a quick spin. I really don’t want to run Linux on this machine, I already have plenty of Linux boxes around but at least it comes with SMP support. Same story as Solaris 10, Linux did not agree with the Raptor and all I got was a black screen with little green men running around the screen.
As a final cause of action I tried both FreeBSD and NetBSD. Turns out NetBSD doesn’t have SMP support either and apparently it doesn’t support keyboards as well as it didn’t respond to mine at all. FreeBSD suffered from the evil Permedia curse. Now I’m back installing Solaris 9 and longing for the day when OpenBSD support SMP on SPARC64. Maybe that would be an interesting future project to take on.. *evil grin*
During the second day of hack-a-ton Mikael and me went out to Lunch and while heading back we found our way to an Asian store where we found a couple of rather interesting beverages. Both came complete with refreshing coconut shavings. I can’t help but feel slightly violated after having guzzled down these vile mixtures.
If you have an extra hemi to spare and too much time to spare check out these neat projects over at gizmag. There are projects ranging from a hemi powered barbeque to a heavy duty shredder.
Finally back up again!
Not only did I get my blog up again thanks to an awesome Sun Enterprise 250 donated by a friend I also, finally, got my Gentoo system back into a usable state. It feels really good to be back in Fluxbox after having been away for more than two years living in evil desktop land.
