Category Archives: Linux

The Great Host Swap

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It’s funny how things work out.  If you’re reading this, you’re on my new server.  The great host swap of 2010 is complete.  God it was a pain, but, sadly, it was necessary.  Things have been solid for a long time here, but I guess everyone has their bad days.  My old host just had a few too many for me to deal with.

My former host was Linode.  For the most part, things were incredibly stable.  Barring recent events, I never had any major issues that weren’t somehow my fault.  I signed up with them in June of 2009 because I noticed their packages offered more bang for the buck than Slicehost (my first host for this blog).  They had a lot of positive reviews, and their control panel software was pretty sweet.  My geek side fell in love with Linode, and I was a happy customer for a long time.  Recently, though… things haven’t been so great.

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Nginx, Rails and PHP: Round 2!

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It’s been a while since I posted about my current webserver setup, and a few things have changed around here!  I like to stay current, and the latest version of PHP has changed the way I build from source.  I’ve also changed the way I install stuff, this way it’s much easier to update things like PHP which tend to litter files all over the place.  Anyway, you came here for the goods, so here we go:

Step 1:  Environment and Pre-Requisites

This section probably looks familiar.  The only difference now is that I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my main server now.  The packages are pretty much the same.  First we make sure the universe repository is enabled by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and removing the hash marks in front of universe lines:

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Mercurial Web with FastCGI & Nginx

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So I’ve finally decided to make the switch to a distributed source control system.  The benefits are well-documented, and I’ve grown weary of Subversion.  After some research, I decided Mercurial would be best for me.  Since I have OCD, and I wanted to push via HTTP to my remote repository, I did some homework and figured out how to get everything running on my VPS.  If you’d like to see how I did it, read on.

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Nginx and Rails and PHP, Oh My!

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As you could probably guess, my blog (and several sites of my friends) are hosted on a lovely Linux VPS provided by Linode.  I honestly can’t say enough nice things about the service and reliability I’ve received from Linode (and no they don’t pay me to speak highly of them!).  But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point is actually quite simple:  My VPS doesn’t have a lot of memory, and I’m always wary of my resource consumption.  A few months ago, I moved from Apache to lighttpd for this reason, alone.  Let’s face it… Apache is a memory hog, and that problem is well-documented, so I won’t really go into details here.  “Lighty” has served me well for the past few months, but for reasons I’m about to explain, I felt the need to move to a different platform.

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