Pervasive Code

I’m working on a project that is deploying on CentOS 5.1, and I found it not entirely obvious how to install a really stripped down server, as a starting point for a lean and mean, hardened production server. Since I’m doing work on this at home on VMWare, and it’s being deployed on a VPS initially (and probably will remain virtualized for ease of management as it scales up), this guide is specifically aimed at this kind of configuration.

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In frustration I made a backup of my laptop hard disk, and did an erase-and-install with Tiger from the install DVDs that came with the laptop. Mind you, the Apple Hardware diagnostic gives this machine a clean bill of health. With the original 512MB DIMM, with nothing plugged in but the power cord, and with a fresh Tiger install, even following an SMC reset, I can crash it. So, this is apparently not Leopard’s fault.
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In short, gain with minimal pain, a couple of small hitches. I went single-core to dual-core with a drop-in replacement CPU and it was almost as easy as replacing the batteries in a flashlight.

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I had some serious Leopard stability problems recently. I thought I had found the problem but I was wrong then.

This time I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten rid of all the badness. I’ve had almost 2 days of continuous uptime, which may not sound like something to get excited about, but it sure beats the 4-6 hour average uptime I’ve had for the past few weeks.

I’ve spent so much time on this that I’m not willing to put in the extra 4-8 hours it would take to really truly isolate this issue. But my best guess is that it was the Canon drivers for my recently purchased Canon PIXMA MX310 multifunction printer. Specifically I think it’s the scanner driver, but I’m not certain. If so, that would mean that the culprits were BJUSBLoad.kext and BJUSBMP.kext in /System/Library/Extensions.
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There’s a new crop of databases that has appeared lately, under the rubric of “document databases”, and there’s quite a lot of enthusiasm for them given that they tend to be slow and very feature-poor compared to the SQL RDBMSs that are the typical persistence mechanism for web applications. What’s mainly appealing about them is that they are easy to use, and theoretically quite scalable, compared to the traditional “one big SQL database server” approach.
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