So, it looks like I’ve gone full circle.

About a week and a half ago, I noticed some major increases in response times from my server.  Even when working in the terminal.  Any command had a 5 second delay from when it executed.  My site wouldn’t load in under 10 seconds.  It was timing out when checking my email, and I was getting error emails sent on the various processes I was running.  Continue reading

As long as I’ve been running a box on linux, all the tutorials and documentation I’ve read have been geared towards integration with a control panel (line cPanel or Virtualmin or ISPConfig).  That’s all fine and good, but when you’re operating a box from your house, or a VPS, you don’t want to pay for the licensing fees or have them installed as the memory hogs they can be.  Not to mention the fact that many of them suggest that you run your user’s sites out of the /var/www/ directory – not exactly a recipe for success, in my opinion. 

I’ve long preferred the standard method of rooting users to the /home/ directory.  It works, and you can lock a user to their individual folder.  Unfortunately, with the way most installations go, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. 

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(I wrote this last week, then saved it, and just realized I forgot to hit “Publish”.)

I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, but I just can’t really get comfortable running Ubuntu as a server.  It’s just too much.

Strike one was the massive memory leak I had in my VPS when I tried Ubuntu there.  When you’re running on 1gb of dedicated memory and 1gb “disk memory”, you can’t afford to be running at those limits after 8 hours of use.  It just doesn’t work well.

Strike two came just last week, when I switched our gaming community’s dedicated server from Win2k3 to Ubuntu, and immediately fried the kernel trying to optimize it for a gameserver.  (Then, to make matters even worse, the company we rented from has horrible service, and wouldn’t even be bothered to reboot it and get it back to a usable kernel).  So that prompted a switch to a provider where I have complete root access.

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Well, my time with bluehost as my provider is an at end. 

After I lost power at the house when I left for the holiday weekend, thus losing my email and other fun services, I decided it was time to look into other alternatives.  I settled on getting a VPS from thrustvps.com.  (A VPS is “virtual private server” – software that allow you to run another instance of an operating system within the main operating system.  Think of it as running Windows inside a Mac.)

It took me forever to get set up.  As with my home box, I’m beginning to loathe CentOS.  It’s stable, which means it also uses some packages that are years old.  That doesn’t help me much sometimes.  CentOS 5, the most recent version, is almost 3 years old now (as are most of the packages).  I tried to run Ubuntu 10.04, but something’s wrong with their template, and I couldn’t get half the stuff I needed to startup at boot time.  So, I’m on yet another flavor of Linux – Debian.

Debian is pretty much the base for Ubuntu, just slightly less friendly.  I also tried out SuSE, Fedora (brother to CentOS), and Ubuntu 8.04.  CentOS, for some reason doesn’t play well with my email push capabilities.  I don’t know what it is.  Probably the older packages, but that’s just a guess at this point. 

For the time being, the only URL that links here is www.t-gk.net.  The main URL with bluehost, www.the-gatekeeper.net will eventually be mirrored over here, once I’m sure that I’m 100% up and running and 100% stable here.  Just a matter of time, really. 

Since my VPS is limited, I have to tweak some of my applications to not be such memory hogs.  Unfortunately, my to-do list (obtained from www.getontracks.org) seems to be the main culprit, eating up nearly 10% of the used memory.  The other is apache (the actual web server itself).  It seems to want to continually start new instances, which would be fine for a major website that has tons of visitors, but I’m not getting a huge amount here, you know. 

When I bought my new Blu-Ray player in March, it kept me from building out an htpc. Or so I thought. My Sony works with my home network, and was supposed to be able (after a firmware update due this summer) to play content from any of my PC’s. That was the plan.

Little did I know along the way that they’d start killing off my media codecs one by one. The biggest blow was the loss of the XVid codec. I like it because it’s high quality, high compression (i.e. small file sizes). I can’t play them any more. And it’s restricted to Windows Media Player extensions (WMV). No AVI, no QuickTime (mov). I spent all this money on a platform that’s turned into a fairly basic blu-ray theater now. (In it’s defense, the internet connectivity is still pretty cool).

Following a post from lifehacker.com (Check this link out) a few weeks back, I started to seriously look at building an HTPC again.  I opted to purchase it’s big brother (The Acer REVO R3610) so I could get the wireless card, faster processor, and more memory.  Continue reading