Bad Memory
Once or twice a week my personal server had some weird trouble with httpd, spamassasin or named suddenly crashing. It seemed impossible to replicate but in recent weeks the problem became worse. First I thought it was some software problem. So I decided to upgrade to CentOS 5. But in the middle of the upgrade the installer suddenly crashed. Luckily the upgrade could be resumed after a reboot into the rescue CD, but it was a bit ugly. Even though the disk, CD and memory (hours of running MemTest86+) all looked fine I finally decided to replace the memory. And wow, the server is as stable as can be. Moral of the story, don’t blame your software (Free Software is uber-stable!) suspect hardware problems (and don’t think MemTest86+ can actually find all memory problems).
Now that my server was uber-stable again (and pretty modern because of the CentOS 5 upgrade) I played a bit with setting up a Mercurial and Trac mirror for Frysk. This was super easy with EPEL a Fedora spinoff to provide stable packages for the enterprise distros (RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux). The only thing missing was Tailor but that could be easily build from the Fedora source package. Trac is super nice, easy to configure and theme for small projects. It provides a wiki, roadmap, ticketing/bug system and source browser for various source code management systems (subversion, mercurial, git or bazaar). And you can disable anything you don’t need (for the Frysk mirror I am only using the source browser). I am definitely going to use Trac plus some distributed source management system for my next project.