This week our server broke down. The harddrive made sounds like hammering their heads against the disc – which of course is not good. So we had to find another harddisk. Fortunately I had kind of a *spare* computer at home which has a lot more harddisk space available (60GB instead of the poor 30GB drive we had). So we switched to this computer.
### Setting up the beast ###
I think it was last week when [Ubuntu 5.10 “The Breezy Badger”](http://www.ubuntulinux.org) was released. Good enough to change. But we had to set up Linux from the beginning, no upgrading since the new computer was configured to be a desktop system, not a server. So installing breezy had to be done.
After the installation process was completed we discovered something strange. The installation disk was labeled “Ubuntu install disk”. But neither [Christian](http://www.ca-net.org) nor I thought about it: maybe, just maybe, there’s still the old version on it. Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary. Damn it. Well, ok, at least we could apt-get dist-upgrade it with the new sources.list. But this is time consuming, I tell you.
### Configuring ###
Christian did all the configuration and restoring needed to recreate our old system. He really did a good job, and the machine did a good job too, it is much faster than our old server. A lot of things had to be done: restoring home directories, reinstalling packages, setting up mail, web, mysql… We had a weekly backup and a daily incremental backup, so this was not too frustrating. But then it happened.
### The Crash ###
You wouldn’t believe it. The beast crashed again. My all-so-good 60GB drive started with read errors, write errors and then refused to get mounted. When Christian restarted even the servers BIOS couldn’t find the drive! This is crazy, you know? Two harddisks going mad in three days.
At least I could find another hard drive at home. This is just a 15GB drive – I hope it lasts longer than the other one. Until we get new ones. I really hope it does.
### Updates ###
We now use the new Ubuntu release 5.10 which is called “The Breezy Badger”. This release includes PHP5. There’s nothing wrong with PHP5 except my fotoalbum wordpress plugin doesn’t work with it anymore. The [DOM XML extension](http://at2.php.net/manual/en/ref.domxml.php) was replaced with the [DOM extension](http://at2.php.net/manual/en/ref.dom.php) in PHP5. And this is bad because my fotoalbum plugin uses the DOM XML extension.
I rewrote it today for PHP5, so have a look. A lot of ISPs still use PHP4, so try out the [fotoalbum wordpress plugin PHP4 version](/data/fotoalbum/fotoalbum-wp-plugin_0.4php4.zip) first. If you’re having trouble using it (ie. your site doesn’t load content and loads again when you deactivate my plugin) then your ISP has PHP5 running and you’ll have to use the [fotoalbum wordpress plugin PHP5 version](/data/fotoalbum/fotoalbum-wp-plugin_0.4php5.zip). Either way have fun with it!
Use the [fotoalbum wordpress plugin page](http://www.sdm-net.org/wordpress-fotoalbum-plugin) for more information on it.
René's Blog 