Yesterday’s issue still isn’t properly resolved.
The bootloader is effectively broken, it’s actually doing a netboot right now which is ugly and it doesn’t solve the problem I was trying to sort out in the first place.*
I’m planning some downtime in the next few days to move paste2.org to a different server so I can do an OS reload on that one and set it up how I want it. I may even end up putting Xen or ESX Server or something on it for a bit more flexibility and run servers out of that which will give me a bit more room to play around (probably some mirroring between multiple VMs, one of which running solaris so I can use dtrace on it).
Just to update on the new paste2 code, I’m currently polishing off the application server I’ve been working on for what seems like decades now. Whilst doing this I’m also trying to put together a realtime(-ish) collaberative editor – so multiple people can edit the same file at the same time, and see updates that other people have made in close-to realtime. By realtime I mean a few seconds later of course – the tech involved of course has latency and also, worse can’t be continously updated for server resources reasons (it’s not feasible to be continiously connected to a http server, though it is possible), you have to work smart and get as close to realtime as resources and the technogy allows. This isn’t new by any means, the likes of etherpad have done it before – but I want to target it at the people who use paste2 rather than people say putting together a rich text doc for example.
* If anybody cares – effectively Grub has made a horific mess of the server, no matter what I do I can’t get rid of it, even using dd on the MBR region of the disk isn’t getting the job done. I need a custom kernel for latencytop and so I don’t have to run VMWare workstation anymore, wanted to get VMWare server running in it’s place which I had issues with before but now the will to get it fixed.
Update (6 March 2010):
The issues have been resolved after a server reload yesterday – the original problem was easily cured once I got GRUB out the way. Now the box is very happily running on LILO with no issues that I know about.