A few Bumps On The Road

As most people who set out to do anything will know, things never turn out exactly according to plan.

WARNING
this post gets fairly deep into computer science subjects and may not be interesting to all audiences. 

In this case, we ran into problems getting the McMyAdmin panel working on CentOS 6.2 64 bit. Why is 64 bit important? Because according to reports online, it works perfectly with 32 bit - that might not seem like a big difference, except that normally 32 bit OS's can't handle more than 4gb of ram. Problem? Our server has 16gb, four times more than the standard 32 bit build can handle. Which means that if we want to make use of all 16gb, we will need a special kernel with a special option enabled, and that special option is PAE or physical address extension. basically, it uses two 32 bit words and joins them to address memory and storage in 64 bit.

So, the solution we have come up with is to wipe the drives clean and install CentOS 6.2 32 bit. Yes, it does slightly delay the server (very slightly) but in the long run, this change will actually make setting up the server easier since it makes it more compatible.

What else could we have done? We could have run a 32 bit copy of the OS in a virtual machine such as XEN or KVM - but it would have had reduced performance. We could have chosen a different 64 bit OS to use, but they all seemed to have similar issues, so it really would have just wasted our time and you would have had to wait longer before the server got delivered (not THAT much longer, but we sense that you guys are eager to get playing!)

One other thing that we would like to mention while we still have your attention, is that since Joel and I both have exams coming up, we won't be posting quite as much or working on the server quite as much in the next two weeks. We will try to keep you updated as we go along.