obscurereality

I migrated spook.digitalhaunt.net off of the colo I had at Liquidweb. There are several reasons behind this, but the most important  is that I didn’t have a UPS in place there. Any time power was lost, it was a hassle to explain to someone it’s ’30 second power trick’, and have them turn it back on (Something strange with its’ power supply).

I decided to go with Slicehost. My colo didn’t need to be as powerful as it was, and slicehost is just simply awesome. For those not familiar, they are a VPS host. Not just any VPS host… From their ‘Slicemanager’, you can add more slices (a slice is a vps), do DNS, manage Backups, add IP addresses, Ajax console access, Bootable rescue mode, reboot and my favorite, Rebuild it. Yes, you can go through 7 distros in about 12 minutes, should you choose to do so (I did!). All you do is click on the ‘Rebuild’ button, choose the linux distro of choice, submit and about 2 minutes later you’ve got a fresh OS. It’s awesome.

We’re just like you. Sick of oversold, underperforming, ancient hosting companies. We took matters into our own hands. We built a hosting company for people who know their stuff. Give us a box, give us bandwidth, give us performance and we get to work. Fast machines, RAID-10 drives, Tier-1 bandwidth and root access. Managed with a customized Xen VPS backend to ensure that your resources are protected and guaranteed.

I’ve also moved away from Slackware. Frankly, Slackware kind of sucks these days, and it’s taken me years to admit it. More about that later. Since I’ve been a sysadmin, I’ve almost exclusively dealt with CentOS, or RedHat. I know it very well, and like the ability to get things done quickly (I’m not a big fan of yum, but it works).

All that being said, spook, now known as fyn, is on CentOS. I’m much happier with it’s setup than I was. I finally got around to using Apache2, and ditched qmail for postfix and courier for dovecot. I’m pretty pleased overall.

I went to pick the colo up yesterday so I could use it at home as my workstation. The craigslist special I was using… well, it’s crap. I put in one of 15′ish Slackware 12.1 cds I made the other day, and not a single one will boot. On any machine. I’m not sure what the problem is, but it’s time to move on. Slackware was good to me for the past 6 or 7 years (Slackware 7, however long that was), but lately it’s been nothing but problem after problem. I think a lot of that comes from Patrick letting stuff slide. Hell, 12.1 ships with the 2.6.24.5 kernel, which is nice and all, but it’s not Slackware. I was surprised it even had 2.6 as default. Same with everything else. I feel like they’re just pushing shit out rather than caring about being stable like they used to.

Good news is, the Arch Linux cd I made worked just fine… and I have a new Linux crush. I’ve installed it a few times here and there, but never really used it until yesterday. I’m a big fan already. Pacman is by far the best package manager I’ve used, and pretty much everything can be found in the repos. Yeah, anyone who knows me, knows I’ve bitched about package management since I started using linux… I’m over it now ; )

Arch Linux is a general purpose Linux® distribution that can be molded to do just about anything. It is fast, lightweight, flexible, and most of the parts under the hood are quite simple to understand and tweak, which can make it a good distro to “learn the ropes” on. We do not provide any configuration helper utilities (ie, you won’t find linuxconf in here) so you will quickly become very proficient at configuring your system from the shell commandline.

It’s not based of any other distro, and there is no bloat. You install the base packages, and simply add what you need. It’s nice to have have to manually compile the things I need, and have to worry about it’s dependencies. At the same time, it’s not holding my hand like Ubuntu or Fedora. Nothing will happen until I tell it too. That’s how it’s been so far anyway.

Screenshots after the break

Fluxbox and Conky.

GIMP 2.6

Terminal (hwd -y and pacman in action)

Sylpheed - Best client ever.