Finally got betips up and running on the linux machine last night at 3:30, sans discussion board. Should have that part up later today. Built a nice back-end so volunteer editors can go in and manipulate tips / process submissions. That should keep the site living and healthy without my intervention on into the future.
Also added a bit about the site change-over to the TrackerBase page.
Before going live, I wanted to get all my MP3s and movies off the big data drives, since going back to get them after this point will mean taking the server down. Consolidated what I wanted to keep onto tink, and popped out Wensleydale (the drive that and the Be community got together and bought for Amy and I for a wedding present, stuffed with MP3s (don’t worry, I saved them all)). Put the drive in my Win machine temporarily, reformatted it with fat32, and put it back in the server. Copied all the stuff to wensleydale, losing all the precious BFS attributes on those MP3s. The attributes meticulously created with RipEnc and ArmyKnife. The attributes the power of which I’ve crowed endlessly about in public. So sad to see all those go to waste. If BONE and BIYS were stable, I’d keep those BFS partitions around and still use BeOS for home MP3 serving, but they’re not. I’m going to find a similar Linux solution.
Of course, fat32 doesn’t support all the characters that BFS does, and the copy process (which took 2.5 hours because Be’s FAT driver is slow) choked on a few files and directories with quote marks etc. in them. Had to go back with ArmyKnife afterwards and fix those. I love ArmyKnife, and I guess using it was the last thing I’ll ever do in BeOS on that machine.
Back in Linux, had to learn how to mount a Windows drive. In BeOS, you right-click on the desktop and choose Mount | DriveName. Doesn’t matter what the filesystem is. And if you want to learn what drives attached to your system are potentially mountable, you use mountvolume -lh or DriveSetup. Linux doesn’t appear to have any such command or utility. Even the GUI tools for drive mounting won’t tell you what’s potentially mountable. Instead, you have to cat through /etc/dmesg to see where your physical drives are, then use fdisk on each of those to find your partitions, then execute a mount command, and if you want that drive mounted in the future, add that stuff to /etc/fstab. What a royal f*scking pain in the ass. And after all that, the drive still isn’t writeable by my normal user, even though I did chmod 777 /mnt/win as root.
God, Linux pisses me off. Be figured out so much about usability so long ago. And the world never cared.
I think that part of what pains me about the conversion of betips is that the site is no longer special. It was the first (if not only) site on the entire web ever to be served out of a database without a database, just using the filesystem and attributes. It was a proof of concept as much as anything. It showed a new and exciting possibility for BeOS. Now it’s just another mysql site. But it’s stable. Getting over BeOS is going to take me a while. Just have to stop thinking about it. Like the death of a loved one…