Truncated Pages
Not too long ago I mentioned that I'd setup and installed Nginx on this server. All seemed well to start off with, then on certain occasions I started to notice that some pages were being served truncated while I was at work. I thought that the issue was work-related, as they have a fairly draconian security policy in place and I thought that it had something to do with severing the connection.
This assumption was proved false a few days ago when I received an email about my Trac/Mercurial/SSH post not rendering properly in someone else's browser. Dammit!
So this time I actually did a bit of research by delving into the log files (yes, I know.. genius isn't it!) and determined that there was indeed a problem. Thankfully it was fairly simple to resolve. For some reason the fastcgi instances were failing to function periodically when attempting to access a folder on disk. In short, some of the temp folders were owned by the right user, and some of them weren't. After modifying the ownership of the appropriate folders, everything seems to be running nicely.
Yet more proof that the admin is an idiot.
If after I post this you notice any truncation at all across the site, please let me know! Cheers!
Server Refresh
Over the weekend I revamped the webserver. Over the last month or two I've been bummed about the amount of overhead in maintaining a Gentoo install as my webserver. Now before any of you Gentoo zealots have a whinge, let me explain.
Yes, Portage is cool. It's quick, it builds stuff from source, etc. While that power is great, it's a pain in the butt at the same time. Especially when you're running on a VPS. I am tired of the underlying bits and pieces changing constantly and me having to muck around with masking and unmasking packages just to get things to update and play nicely together.
I made the decision to switch to Debian and I am happy I did it. I don't think the time I'll have to spend maintaining the server will be as high as before. This is all about productivity and as far as I'm concerned this is going to reduce my workload. Given that my software installs don't change once I've got the server up and running, I shouldn't have to spend that amount of time keeping things running.
As always, there's a risk of teething problems when you do a full reinstall. So if anyone out there is having issues then please let me know. Cheers! 
The Admin is an Idiot
Yes, and that admin is me!
I usually do a fairly decent job of keeping the server patched, up to date, and clean. Over the Xmas period where I wasn't really looking at anything online, something went wrong.
I logged on this morning only to find that the server wasn't responding. I could connect via SSH, but nothing was being served via HTTP. So I tried to reboot LiteSpeed to see if that would resolve it (as you do 
). The service stopped, but failed to restart!
