IT as it should be at 90KM/h
As some of you already know I’m moving my services to another server. Not that special. But this time it’s different. I work for a company selling electronics and photography gear. Those guys needed a webshop. I have made them a webshop and it’s doing pretty well. But I wouldn’t be me if that site didn’t require cutting edge technology support on the server and some Command Line hacked scripting support. Most of my sites are managed by a CLI administration toolset. Of course my employer doesn’t have the skill to operate a UNIX-like environment with some ill-documented tools I have fabricated. When I tell him to just run “vmsimport WEBSHOP.TXT” at the command line while being logged in as the right user and after uploading the TXT dump from the exchange system to the home directory using sftp I think he will lose me at the “run” part. My tools all come with their own little ncurses interface, but it’s still too hard to leave that damned mouse alone. So I’ve built him a nice web interface. Oh the horror. Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that I’m really picky on what platform it is going to run and what rights I get as a user. I still want to use my command line tools and I just have to fix stuff in config files and the mysql prompt. Besides, for me a command line environment is just as useful as a fully fledged desktop environment like KDE some people like to use (not me that is). And another place on the web where I can access my email and chat with people always comes in handy. It’s hard to get a place where I can get all these rights. Oh, and I’d like a usable software build kit (GCC, Make, etc) to install my own software. I hate uploading binaries all the time. But I seemed to be in luck. I found this place, computrade.nl, managed by a guy who used to supply my hardware and where a friend of mine works. It was a P4 3.00 HT box with 1024 megs of RAM running Fedora Core 2. Not that bad, half the sf.net network is running on machines like that. The only difference is that those machines are managed by professionals. This machine is poisoned with this ugly tool called “Direct Admin”. The owner of the machine likes it because he shouldn’t be adminning GNU/Linux boxes in the first place. He can now thanks to this system. Ok, there’s nothing wrong with that but if you have to get something done DA can’t do you’re screwed and you’ll have to call for assistance. DA can’t manage your system. It’s just a tool to make things easier. But I think you shouldn’t use it unless you know exactly what it’s doing after you click one of it’s shiny web2.0 buttons. You might have guessed it. The guy responsible for this machine didn’t know jack shit about how to manage a Fedora box. As I was putting more features into my webshop I found out I didn’t have GD2 TTF support for PHP. So I sent him an email asking for TTF support. I didn’t hear from him for at least three weeks. In the meanwhile some more improvements in my code drove me towards the use of subqueries for MySQL. This box was running 4.0.x. So I’ve sent another email requesting a MySQL update so I could use my new code on his box. Nothing again. One day at work I was horrified. The site was down. No warning, no error, nothing. It was just gone. After some hasty calls trying to reach the guy I finally got him on the phone. Our website exceeded it’s bandwidth limit. Luckaly he was able to fix it all with one shiny web2.0 button in DA. I rushed to enable gzip compression on all our pages while requesting some more bandwidth. I was shocked after hearing the price. For the money he was charging for this service we could host our own server. I already was in the first stages of getting my own server together with a friend of mine so we asked if my employer would support our idea. He agreed and we deceided to look around a bit in hosting country. After our long and dreadful search we’ve made our choice. We will buy a nice Sun Fire X2100 server. It’s a 1U high performance server with one 939 Opteron and alot more candy inside. Go have a look at the specs at Sun.com. Since I’m a self proclaimed Debian fanboy so Solaris has got to go. I’ll make this the best X2100 LAMP server Sun has ever seen. A custom -cks kernel, Debian GNU/Linux AMD64, Apache2, PHP5, MySQL5, Postfix and Dovecot. The standard approach with my own personal touch to it. I had to study a bit on mail handling using Dovecot since the only mail installs I have worked with were Courier and QMail combos for a single domain. I’ve figured out how to configure Postfix, Dovecot and MailScanner for optimal security and performance possible with the software. Before I get hatemail about QMail being more secure and Dovecot creating zombie processes that won’t die all the time I just have to say I’ve worked with QMail and Courier and my new setup outperforms my old configs like a fox versus a turtle. It’s nice and stable and easy to configure. This new box will be hosting mail and web services for me, my friend (yes, the guy from iblogzz, techtics and blogplek) and my employer. Maybe some more people but for now we have to check if there’s room enough to spare. We’ll be hosting our server at transip. It’s a Dutch network over at Redbus Interhousing in Amsterdam. It’s maintained by BSD fanatics, somehow I know my data is safe that way. Just like it is at interlink. We’ll have 100Mbit/s connection to some of the biggest networks around.
Most of the important stuff was discussed inside a roller coaster going at 90KM/h. Me and two friends have visited Walibi. It’s an awsome park with lots of fun things to do. Not alot of people were present at the time because of the weather. It was rainy that day. We didn’t care and enjoyed the oppertunity to just go thirty times in a row trough the same coaster. I can’t say I’m that thrilled with coasters, I think they just don’t go fast, high or hard enough. But it was fun to scare people with the degree of calmness I could display while going trough some tight curve at blazing speeds. The best thing were the pictures you get at the end of the track. We usually displayed some scene out of the Pure Pwnage series. It was quite a fun day but I think I’ll have to look for a higher rush than a roller coaster. Luckaly my brother is just like me and isn’t easily scared either. I think we’ll go skydiving this summer in stead of a holiday we previously planned out to do. Maybe if our budget allows it bunjee jumping, too. The best place to do stuff like that is New Zealand but I’m not filthy rich, not even a little.
And I’ve made some great progress at my study. I’m teaching myself ANSI C in stead of that stupid Object Orientated C++ from Borland. Luckaly my teacher allows me to make my stuff using a simple ascii editor and GCC. I’ve almost ported txt2bf to C like I promised a while ago. There are still some things even my teacher doesn’t understand I have to figure out.
Oh, P.S. MySQL still isn’t updated and my friend has lost quite some money thanks to downtime. I bet my employer didn’t like the downtime either.