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New and improved! The migration of unto.net to longer-term servers is almost done. I ended up going with John Companies thanks to the advice of Matthew and Brett. Basically it is another VPS host, but this one is more than enough to power this little site, and will be enough to launch the new project. And they support (not just with their words, but with a great discount) open source development.
Total time to migration: 4 hours. 1 hour on Sunday doing the research (thanks to the recommendations of others), 1 hour doing basic system setup yesterday morning, 1 hour migrating the actual software last night, and 1 hour cleaning up the little pieces this morning. I flipped the switch around lunchtime. So if you can read this, you are hitting the new servers. Though the old DNS records won’t fully die until later tonight, so you might still hit the old machines off and on.
Updates on the project will pick up again tomorrow. I’m still avoiding letting it cut in to work hours at all, so I just need to budget time. And also my apologies if I owe you an email. Tonight I’ll try and catch up. (Sorry, no picture on this one.) [Update: So I added one. Whatever. I don't make a living at it.]
May 24th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
I’m not sure why the migration is marking everything new on the RSS feeds, but I apologize for the incovenience.
May 24th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
At least for me (in Bloglines), I only got this one entry as new.
May 25th, 2005 at 7:11 pm
If you have the time, would you tell us more about the new set-up? Why the change of heart about UML? How much physical RAM has your virtual machine been allotted?
Thanks in advance.
May 26th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Sure, I’d be happy to.
For a while, unto.net was hosted at Rackforce up in Canada. I liked that it was hosted outside the US, but I wasn’t a big fan of how tweaked their Linux distro appeared — it was heavily modified and a lot of it was out of my control. Their VPS solution was built by Virtuozzo. It was fast, but not lightning fast. The cpuinfo showed up as a single Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz and with 1.44 GB available RAM.
Then I moved to Quantact down here in the Bay Area. I did this because I liked the guy who runs it and I liked that he offered a dozen stock distros of my choice. However, this used UML, which is perhaps the future of virtual hosting, but right now it is limited for enterprise apps. This showed up as up with 3303.01 bogomips, so probably about a single 1.6GHz CPU. (I think the actual hardware is dual-proc, however.) I had 118 MB of available RAM. This is plenty for a blog, just not for a web service like AWS OpenSearch that can get hit many times a second.
John Companies is also running Virtuozzo. What I liked about them is that their network is triple-homed and very fast, their disk arrays are RAIDed and running at either 10,000 or 15,000 RPM, they do automated backups for free, they have an external firewall for you for free, they provide *quality* free 24×7 support, they provide a choice of distros that can be configured in a sane way, their kernels are recent and include iptables, etc., and they offered me a great deal. Their cpuinfo shows up as a *four way* Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz with 6GB of available RAM. After a few fast compiles I’d say this some of the fastest hardware I’ve had, even as a VPS.
Hope that helps!
May 27th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
Ugh. That was the longest site outage yet. I had to recompile Apache httpd and restart it. When it tried to come up it blocked on a call. I straced it to see that it was blocking on a read to /dev/random. Took me about 10 minutes before I decided to just chuck /dev/random and symlink /dev/urandom in instead. Not sure if that is a Virtuozzo issue or not.