r3dux.org

I’ve had this site hosted with the same hosting company for as long as I’ve had it, which has got to be coming up to around five years now – and ya know, they’re okay. It costs me maybe £60 per year for the domain r3dux.org plus a shared hosting package of maybe 8GB file storage, a couple of MySQL databases, e-mail, FTP, support etc. – which to be fair is a pretty good deal! That £60 goes a long way – which means it’s stretched very, very thin…

The kicker is that my hosting package is exactly what it said on the tin when I bought it: Shared hosting – this means that this site, plus a large number of other sites are all hosted on the same server with no separation of any kind between them – so when a bit of JavaScript or PHP or ASP or whatever goes and thrashes the box, or hangs using 100% CPU, it takes everything else down with it. 503 Site unavailable. Game Over.

And this has happened a lot.

The file server goes down, so the MySQL server isn’t asked for files, or the MySQL server goes down, so the requests for data go unanswered – if it’s not all working together, you’ve got a blank page. Over the years I’ve bit my lip, fired off support tickets, waited patiently, put up with very sluggish performance just being thankful that it works – but no more! We’re moving on to greener, and faster pastures… Enter stage right: VPS

A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a slice of a full hardware server. The full server might have 32GB of RAM, my slice might have 512MB of that. The full server might have a TB of storage, my slice might have 30GB of that. The full server might have 2 x 4Ghz processors, my slice might have full use of them for 5ms out of ever 1000ms in a second. And the slices are strongly separated, commonly with virtualisation software such as OpenVZ or Xen.

This means that if, for example, Joe Blogg’s server has some nasty script that’s thrashing the CPU, it’s thrashing his slice of the CPU (i.e. his 5 milliseconds) – but not mine! From a users perspective, this means that his site might be down, but all the other VPS’ on the physical server will still be up. In effect, one errant site or script can’t scupper all the sites on the server – Win!

But it’s a little more complicated than that…

VPS’ come in different flavours – fully managed, and unmanaged. With a fully managed VPS you have people to help you set it up; they can set up or help to set up web-servers (apache etc.), email servers, ftp servers, MySQL servers etc., but you pay $30AU more for the VPS. Per month.

With unmanaged VPS’s you just get the VPS plus an install of an operating system of your choice (Debian, Centos, Ubuntu etc.) – but that’s it. It’s up to you to install and set up apache. It’s up to you to run your own ftp server. It’s up to you to run your own mailserver… For example, if I wanted mail at r3dux dot org to be a valid email address – *I* need to install, configure and administrate the email server for that to happen. You get complete control of your VPS, but you get complete control of your VPS, if you see what I mean… For $30AU a month saving, I think I’ll run everything myself, thanks

After all this, there’s still the matter of the DNS records – currently my hosting provider runs a DNS server (well, two really – a primary and a secondary; ns1.somehostingco.com and ns2.somehostingco.com) – once I have my site hosted on the VPS, I need to be able to update the DNS records so when you go to http://r3dux.org it translates to the IP address of where I’m now hosted, instead of the IP address of where I was hosted, and with my current hosting people I don’t believe I can change that, so I need to transfer my domain to a registrar where I’m able to edit the records to say I now live here!

As you can see, it’s no small task – but I reckon I’m up for a weekend project

If you never see anything on this site ever again – I’ve failed! But with with any luck, at least at some point in the very near future, I’ll see you on the other side

It’s been so long since I looked at my old site, since I was my old young (better yet so much worse) self, that I’d almost forgotten that I used to write…

I really should get ’round to making a PDF of the old PHP-Nuke site… I’m sure it’s aged terribly, and probably isn’t relevant any more (How To: Fix Some Stupid Shit in Windows XP etc.) – but it’s part of my life, and I think it deserves the light of day, if not much else…

I’ll have to wait for my return to the UK to get a copy of the old database (September 2010 currently planned), but once I have it raw, I don’t think it would take more effort than it’s worth to sling the lot into some kind of compendium of misplaced youth…

Burn your bank statements, keep your love letters, eh?

Around 5 years ago I decided I needed a pet project, something to keep me occupied and amused, so I got a domain and some hosting and started r3dux.org. I ran the site on PHP-Nuke for a couple of years, but was never really too happy with it. I couldn’t code PHP at the time, so it was difficult and frustrating to modify the code to do what I wanted. There were no spam filters for nuke, and no plugins I was aware of, so when an article got spammed I’d be digging the code out of the database with PHPMyAdmin, and then older articles would get targeted so you’d wake up one day and notice 300 viagra spam comments which had been there for a week etc. It just wasn’t what I had in mind when I started the project so I pulled the plug.

I’d planned on writing my own custom CMS in PHP to help me learn the lang, but then I ended up with PHP as my main programming language at work, so I didn’t really have to. And after working on PHP projects 9 to 5 all day, 5 days a week, the last thing you want to do when you get home from work all tired and mentally exhausted is to work on yet more PHP – so I left things be while the site sat on the internets all sad and alone with a single page promising greater things to come. It stayed that way for 9 months or so, and when I’d finally realised that I’d never have the time nor inclination to write my own CMS, I installed WordPress – and things have been happy ever since!

Not to put too fine a point on it, WordPress is a fantastic CMS – well written, hugely customisable, and has great plugin support (of which there are thousands ranging from stats and spam blocking to related-posts, video-quicktags, quote-of-the-day, SEO optimisation, caching etc.) It really makes life as simple or involved as you like to do pretty much anything you could want to do on a blogging platform. And it’s this platform that I’ve been using for one year today according to my first post

In that time, r3dux.org has gone from zero to slightly more than zero hits – and now gets over 9000 page hits per month (although to be fair, I got a slab of 1000+ hits last month from StumbleUpon, so I’m batting above my average there!) – and I hope to continue that growth throughout 2010 with this cunning three-point strategy:

1. Write useful, informative and well explained articles with the occasional picture, song or video to break up the tech shenanigans.
2. Try to post something at least once a day. Try hard. But if there’s really nothing fun or interesting to post just cut your losses and go for a one-a-day average.
3. Don’t get lazy! Remember: What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Simple, straight-forward, hope it works! =D

Looking at the post hits, the top five (six in the list, but I don’t really count the home page as an article) are all how to do something; how to hack a Wii, how to setup an FTP server etc. – so I’m really happy people have (hopefully) been able to get things done from the articles – it’s what makes the time and effort worthwhile.

I’d like to go back to the PHP-Nuke stuff and drag it back from depths, because I’m sure that not every post over those three or four years was entirely without merit, so maybe I’ll set up the nuke portal locally and trawl it for goodness… I guess a lot of it will have dated, but hopefully there’ll be enough there to warrant the occasional re-post or fill a dull news day. I guess I could even slap the lot into a single PDF and host it here, if only for sentimental value…

With that said and done, all that remains is to say Thank You; to everyone who’s taken the time to glance at the site, or post a comment, or be part of my life.

Thank you!

As Sage Francis would put it – I’m back to destroy decoys and be the -real- McCoy…. Yeeeaaahhhhh BHOY

Had planned on writing my own CMS and did get a bunch of work done on it… it’s just that there’s always a thousand other things to do, and writing a CMS is pretty low on the list of priorities. So, instead of just leaving r3dux.org empty, I’ve finally buckled and installed WordPress. Total install time including tweaking the config to talk to the MySql server – 15 mins. Gotta say – the installation process is impressively slick. Slap 4 fields in a config file, upload, run the install where you just name your blog and enter an email – that’s IT. Pretty slick…

I took down the php-nuke portal here maybe, what? A year ago? 9 months ago? So as far as updates go… there’s far too much to wibble on about in one bash, suffice to say – I jacked in EADS, moved to Australia and am bloody loving it

The only tricky bit is getting a job when you’ve only got a working holiday visa and can only work for a company for 6 months at a shot. Am looking around at contract work in Melbourne, but it’s not the easiest thing to get in the current clime with all the economic meltown, erm, melting down. Will persevere and get something in the end, or end up a dual British/Australian citizen and get the six month handcuffs off. Either way, I’m quietly optimistic.

What kind of stuff am I going to sling up on here? Well…

• Tech stuff — any and every

• Linux bits, pieces, fixes n’ the like..  — oh yes… ya gotta love the linux

• Gaming shenanigans — ’nuff said

• Pic-a-chuz — and any interesting/funny type junk I come across

• Pipe schmokin’  amputee pr0n — and lots of it

So the same as before then? Er, that’s a yes. If I really wanted to write big-ass articles about turnips or whatnot, I’m prolly better of submitting them to Turnip Monthly than shoving them here.

More digital scrap-pad than anything else, hopefully we’ll end up with some interesting/amusing and (possibly) useful scraps of knowledge chipped from the block of the interweb and/or stolen from YouTube comments.

Let the games commence!