Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

Great Scott!!

So it is a three day weekend, I wish I could say that I have been spending it near a lake or being ultra productive.

But no such luck. I have been a wee bit productive. Playing for of a support role today.

Gina and John have been doing home improvement today. John arrived this morning at about 8:10, Gina had woken me up around 6:30 or so.

She made us breakfast consisting of blueberry pancakes, eggs, hashbrowns (like the ones @ IHOP) and crispy bacon.

Since I am a bit more technically inclined than industrially inclined I have been playing more of a gopher role today. I did get to play with a neat belt/disc sander thing. They had taken off the base boards and wanted me to sand some gunk off the back of them. It was some sort of caulk mixed with paint.

The idea was to get the base boards to a point where they could put them back on the wall, but flat. I apparently had a little too much fun with the sander, as they did not lay flat on the wall after I was done.

So off to the "Home Despot" to buy some base boards. I called Gina after I left to find out the size I needed. They have quite the selection there you know. I needed to get two very, very long pieces about 13 ft. The base boards start out @ 16 ft.

I found a style that I liked and then proceeded to walk around with 2 x 13 ft base boards standing straight up (I foolishly did not choose the lumber cart). I also had to pick up some caulk and some hinges, I also split a base board into two 8 ft pieces. Hopefully I won't have to go back to the Home Despot tomorrow, but I probably will.

I also had to make soda run. Then I picked up dinner from Delaware Subs.

However, I did have a chance to perform a role that I am familiar with. John had recntly built a pretty slick pc. However, due to a minor over-clocking incident it wasn't booting up properly. So I had a chance to flex my technical muscle, I looked up the model and found out that they make an ISO based BIOS package. So one burned CD later and John's pc was back in action. I won't try to say that this was a uber complicated problem, but it felt good to help out when I can.

So whats up with 1.21 Gigawatts?

I have been watching "Back to the Future" while working on migrating sites from the old Spry host to the new server.

"Earth Angel, Earth Angel"

But I digress.

So not many probably know that Google will soon be controlling our Internet interactions. As Jeremy is fond of saying "I welcome Google as our new lord and masters." Did I quote you accuratley there Timmy?

I have offered up the hosting of my personal domain's email to Google. Well, more accurately I applied to Beta their latest service offering, it is primarily oriented @ small businesses but they decided to let me play too. Google Apps for Your Domain

I found out about this offering by way of Anil Dash's blog that I try to stay current with, made all the easier thanks to RSS feeds.

Well, I got my technosnobs mail configured the way that I wanted. I also forwarded my regular gmail account to my new technosnosbGmail account, this way I'm not having to check multiple spots for mail. I am not sure whether I will try to use POP3 to get my mail or if I will just use gmail in the browser. Since I usually have googleTalk running I get notified of mail that I have waiting for me in the system tray.

Anyway, I have a few more domains and websites to finish transfer in the morning. But things are rocking and rolling. I already transferred Gina's blog over. I still need to do Amanda and Henry's blog, along with the sites related to uRevoo. But after tonight's practice those should go pretty quickly I have a nice little system working.

Jeremy needs to apply for Google's Beta too, since I haven't fully configured the mail functions on the new server, and now I don't want to bother figuring it out. Thanks Google, you appeased my inner lazy man.

Well, I better get to bed. John will be back early in the morning I am sure to finish up in there. We have to put up the new base boards still. But they are definitely done with the floor.

Narcoleptic time, laterz.

One spare machine...
Four misplaced Fedora Core 3 install discs...
Another week on a $20/month VPS...
Priceless.

Some of you out there might think this blog runs slow because of your internet connection. Some of you might even think that it is slow because of something blocking the network of tubes that is the Internet.

No, the real reason it is slow is because Jeremy and I (and our buddy Patty) are all splitting a $20/month VPS account. \

What is a VPS you say?

Virtual Private Server.

A VPS is basically our own server. It has an independent apache, mysql, php engine. This means we can do whatever we want on it, except for the fact that it is on a shared server. The VPS software allows our hosting company (Spry) to host multiple "servers" on the same physical hardware. Usually this works out ok.

However, recently our "roommates" on the server have been pushing a considerable amount of load. This means that it has been degrading our service. We opened a ticket, but honestly there isn't a whole lot of bitching that we can do for $20/month.

So we hatched a plan. We need better hosting, except that the level of hosting we are looking for starts at $59.99. Well, we looked around and compared prices, in terms of VPS pricing, Spry is about as good as they get. But the issue of "roommates" still was a topic, if we are paying like $59.99 a month, but get stuck with folks that are pushing too much traffic (say big hits from digg).

So we looked around some more (I say we, but it was mostly Jeremy). We found some pricing for some colocation hosting. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it means Jeremy and I put a server into their location, they hook it up with Internet and power for a monhtly fee, or we co-locate our servers next to theirs.

The ones in Austin start @ about $100. A bit out of our price range.

Now, you might wonder about "Why does it have to be in TX?" Well, when you split the duties between the two of us, I basically have the skillz (and the brains enough) to maintain a server. History has shown that Jeremy and server administration is like mixing oil, water, and a match.

So he does the bulk of any coding, while I handle maintenance, administration, architecture, database design, and minor coding.

The other factor about co-locating vs a bigger VPS is the uRevoo project. It is likely that we can host uRevoo on our own server and be ok during alpha and beta, but on a VPS we might have some big issues.

Back to the search. Dallas was the next place to start looking, since I am there fairly regularly for work. (On avg every other week.)

We found a company, Sprocket Data that has co-location starting @ $59.

We talked about it, and it seems pretty decent. I mean yes it is $40 more than $20. But with the cost split between Jeremy, Patty and myself it gets to be considerably less. We will probably also do some serendipity Blog hosting for dirt cheap rates to subsidize the cost of the hosting.

The nice thing about the Sprocket Data is that they let you colo a mini-tower or a rackmount. This meant that the spare machine that I have could be turned into a server, negating the need for Jeremy and I to pony up $300 each for a new server to be built.

My mini-tower spare machine consists of:
AMD Athlon 2000+ (1.67Ghz)
1GB RAM
60GB Harddrive
DVD Drive
CDRW Drive
GeForce MX4000 (PCI)

Not a bad little web server. Especially since it will need to host MySQL for a while as well. (Eventually we are thinking we will need to seperate web server and database server functions to gain an increase in efficiency).

I have made web servers out of HP Brios:
P3-600Mhz
512MB Ram
20GB Drive
CD Drive
Onboard video

The brio web servers were running Redhat 7 & 9. Honestly, not too bad at all. Decen response speeds and could handle a fair amount of load. I wish I still had one, so I could run some apache benchmarks on it. Maybe I can dig one up at work.

But I digress.

I was supposed to finish configuring the AMD-2000 for install this week @ Sprocket. However, I couldn't find the install discs. I had installed Fedora Core 3 on it before, but I think I botched it, because MySQL wasn't working right.

Well, I took the box to work today, in the hopes of starting the install around lunch and click/hitting 'Next' until it was done (not too hard overall). Unfortunately, I couldn't find any install discs at work either.

So when I get back from Dallas, I will find the discs in my home office (easier said than done, I swore I saw them last week). And try to get it done so that the next time I am going to Dallas I can drop it off at the colo and get us off Spry.

Definitely starting Sept 1, we will be on a new hosting server.

I really do like Spry, but for the $$$ Jeremy and I need to look at colocation vs VPS. I do highly advocate VPS as a solution, because the environment can be put together quickly, it is cheap. But you do have to worry about the occasional "roommmate" problem, and well for $20/month you can't bitch too much.

I best hit the road.

Laterz.