Blue Screen of Death is "Anqas Toqu millay" - Filthy Blue Window is the best I could do. Microsoft releases language support for Quechua, one of the native languages spoken in Bolivia. Probably to less fanfare than they expected.\

"We congratulate Microsoft for having facilitated the use of computers in our own languages, but we have to advance towards systems that are more open because we still have to pay a license fee (to use the software) to Microsoft," Bolivia's Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said.

Curiously, there are also efforts to make translations available for linux and gnome.

But when I came back in, Staci was up listening for a sound. "You know, before you turned on the AC, I thought I heard something like a scratch." Something was going on. We fell silent and then we heard the sound of scratching on metal, or was it just metal expanding. No, it was scratching, a somewhat frantic scratching.

In a few moments, we isolated the sound and found it was coming from the fireplace in our bedroom. Very desperate scratching, pretty much get me the heck out of here now. What had gotten trapped in our chimney? A bird, squirell, racoon, zombie racoon? We had no idea, we just knew it was trying to get out of the chimney and into our bed room.

Its at this point that watching Night of the Living Dead and other zombie flicks finally paid off. Without thinking, we started to figure out how to barricade the chimney. An old book shelf on its side covered most of the opening, and I scavenged some spare shelfs and bits of wood from the basement. A file safe and our laundry hamper added some weight to secure the shelf in place in case this was an above average size bird or rodent.

{vspace="0" hspace="20" border="0" align="right"}Its at this point, admiring our handiwork, that I realized I'm woefully unprepared for the zombie apocalypse. At best, we could fortify our bedroom but that leaves us pretty far away from the kitchen and pantry. At some point, I'd also decided a shovel would make a good weapon in case it came down to a primal showdown. Not a little spade mind you, but a full length shovel which would have been impossible to swing around. At best I could poke at the vermin with it and hope to fend it off before it ate my brains.

Having secured the bedroom, we moved for the night to the spare bedroom. There was no way we would be sleeping with the scratching as background noise for the night. We spent sometime looking through the phone book for a pest control company that might be open at 4 in the morning. When the fourth one we called also went straight to their voice mail, we called it a night.

The next morning, the scratching had ceased. Either the scratcher had gotten out or died. Staci lined up a pest control company who could send someone out before noon to check out the chimney. The pest guy showed up ten minutes before noon and hoisted his ladder up to the roof. It turns out that bird must have made its way in through a gap in the chimney cap, which we need to repair now.

So, if you've learned anything from this story it should be to 1) be prepared to barricade yourself in your house and 2) a shovel is not the ideal weapon for close quarters combat.\

Debian AMD64 Setup

My Linux distribution of choice is Debian, although for the desktop I'd recommend Ubuntu. The server was first setup using the unofficial debian64 repositories. Since the amd64 architecture is now officially part of Debian, we moved to using an official repository. see Google groups. An unofficial repository contains /debian-amd64/ like so:

#deb http://mirror.espri.arizona.edu/debian-amd64/debian/ sarge main contrib
#deb-src http://mirror.espri.arizona.edu/debian-amd64/debian/ sarge main contrib

Since packages make it to stable at a fairly slow pace, we also want to use the testing branch. This is fairly straightforward, first update your /etc/apt/sources.list to use etch/testing by removing (or commenting out) other repositories and adding the following lines. If you are outside the USA, replace the .us. part with your country code.

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib

Next, run apt-get to update the system, first clean the system, then update, and upgrade.

apt-get clean
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

Follow the onscreen instructions, when in doubt pick the default option or swithc to google and read up. If apt installs a new kernel, you'll have to restart your server. Finally, to get up to date LAMP packages, you can use the dotdeb repositories by adding the following lines to your sources.list. We will need these later to install Apache2, MySQL, and PHP5.

deb http://dotdeb.netmirror.org/ stable all
deb-src http://dotdeb.netmirror.org/ stable all

Kernel Parameters

Since our last server crashed because of a very low max open files limit, its worth checking that this setting is not too low on the new server.

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

Currently this returns 100905, which should be more than enough open files for our expected traffic. See Debian kernel tuning for more info.

Enabling Hyperthreading

Finally, because the CPU is an Intel P4 with hyperthreading, you can try using an SMP kernel to enable the 2 "virtual" processors. While there seems to be some debate on the benefits of Intel's hyperthreading, IBM{.urlextern rel="nofollow"} produced some benchmarks on the 2.6.15 kernel which show some gains. You can install a new kernel with:

apt-get install linux-image-2.6.16-2-em64t-p4-smp

Make sure you install the correct one for your CPU, since there are a generic 64-bit kernel, AMD specific kernels, Intel specific kernels, as well as single and multi-processor versions for each.

That's it for this part, if you restart you should still have a working server (I do). Still to do: basic system security and setting up a LAMP environment