DBG/400 News 2006

There have been a number of changes to the site, principally to move content from the old static site into the wiki. That's given me the chance to standardize the installation instructions and update the content. Hopefully I managed this without breaking links. For the most part there are redirects to the new locations, so existing links elsewhere on the 'net to content here should still work.

I'm also planning to move my web/mail server (Athlon 850MHz, 1.25Gb RAM) onto a newer box (2.8GHz P4 HT/3Gb RAM) sometime in January, which should improve things.

Another change is the start of a site for Wetherby Civic Society. I had a few pages for them back in the late '90s, when I was more active on the committee. Now they are wanting to give it another go, and using TWiki will let them add pages and keep things up to date without any specialist web skills. It was also an incentive to get the server upgraded (and get myself a new desktop system as part of the swap around).

-- MartinRowe - 30 Dec 2006

I'm in the process of moving some content off this site onto a hosted account to save the drain on my bandwidth! Basically it's just the big files like those for TWikiVMDebianStable. It should mean faster and more reliable downloads once all the files have been uploaded. This also involves some DNS changes, so there may be some (hopefully brief) outages for the dbg400.net domain whilst I switch things round.

Other changes on this site have been to upgrade to TWiki 4.0.5 and I've added a new Wildlife? web which will (at some point) have wildlife photos & notes from local trips a holidays further afield.

-- MartinRowe - 11 Nov 2006

I've uploaded a new save file of the DBG400 library, including all source code, to the new DownloadPage (which is also in the navigation bar on the left). There are a few utilities in there that haven't been released before (don't get too excited) which I'll package up individually at some point. Primarily this is for people having problems building from the XML installers.

-- MartinRowe - 05 Sep 2006

TWiki 4.0.4 just released. A few minor changes that got missed in 4.0.3, plus a security fix for a vulnerability discovered recently (which didn't affect my install, but it's good to know it was fixed).

-- MartinRowe - 05 Jul 2006

TWiki 4.0.3 was released on Monday. Very smooth transition this time round, as none of the changes from 4.0.2 impacted on changes I've made locally.

-- MartinRowe - 28 Jun 2006

Added a simplified SiteMap to (hopefully) make navigation easier. With all the source code links in the main WebTopicList, it can be tricky to find the main entry pages of the site. I've moved the TWikiVMDebianStable download files to another subdomain of this site, and switched the bandwidth throttling to control just that domain. I was getting hit by people using download accelerators leaching nearly all my upload bandwidth, but locking that down further would hurt visitors to the main site.

-- MartinRowe - 30 Apr 2006

TWiki 4.0.2 has just been released and it's running here now. There are a few minor config changes I need to make, to tweak files I've previously customised, but it should be okay for now.

-- MartinRowe - 01 Apr 2006

I've added bandwidth throttling, courtesy of mod_cband, to leave a little bit of room to make surfing from this side of the cable reasonable. The change has come since adding a mirror page for TWikiVMDebianStable - a VMware virtual machine image running Debian GNU/Linux with TWiki preloaded and ready to run. The files are 131Mb or 220Mb, and are downloaded around 10 times a day - so were making things a bit sluggish. See the main project page at TWiki:TWikiVMDebianStable

-- MartinRowe - 31 Mar 2006

Response times should be better now, as I've added Persistent Perl (aka SpeedyCGI ) as per the suggestions on TWiki.org. It does to make quite a difference - time will tell. Let me know if anything ends looking weird, in case things are being too persistent

-- MartinRowe - 25 Mar 2006

Just a few minor tweaks to page content around the site. There is quite a bit of outdated information, particularly on the static pages set up over five years ago. I aim to bring them into the wiki and update the content at the same time. Plus the site's navigation could do with an overhaul. Using TWiki makes that task easier, but it will take time.

-- MartinRowe - 10 Feb 2006

A few more server related changes. There are some bug fixes & speed-ups in TWiki 4.0.1, which is now up & running. I've also switched back to Apache 2. I'm not planning to turn on mod-perl in the near future, and Apache 2 seems to perform a bit better than 1.3 (plus the extra RAM added late last year helps too). Lastly I've turned on all the features of the %TWIKIWEB%.BlackListPlugin so hopefully I shouldn't get as much vandalism as last year.

-- MartinRowe - 08 Feb 2006

The site has had a facelift following the release of TWiki 4.0 (codename Dakar) on the 1st of Feb. I've been experimenting with the beta releases for the last few months and it looks pretty good. For the time being I haven't turned on mod-perl for this version until I've had more time to test it. I would prefer to move to Apache 2 if performance doesn't prove too much of an issue. Registration? should be open again, and I've added a BlackList Plugin to try to curtail spam & bogus registrations. You will need to provide a valid email address to register, but it is no longer displayed on the site.

-- MartinRowe - 04 Feb 2006

Just had a cable modem installed which should mean a better net connection - the set top box has done okay, but didn't seem to like too many connections. My assigned IP address has changed as a result, so it will take a while for DNS changes to propagate.

-- MartinRowe - 07 Jan 2006