I’ve finally got my own server. I had been planning to get one from Server Matrix — last week’s WHT special was pretty good — but I ended up getting a substantial discount from my employer. Officially we don’t get a break on dedicated servers, but… I convinced the sales manager to credit the price of the free shared hosting account we’re entitled to, which is not a cheap one, waive the setup free, and knock off almost 25% for paying a year in advance. On a monthly basis it works out to about half of what I grudgingly pay AT&T Wireless…
Too freakin’ cheap to pass up, in other words, despite SM offering some better features.
The downside is that now I have to pretend to be a Linux SysAdmin. And migrate all of my stuff. But first I have to figure out how I’m going to configure everything. I naturally want to run Debian because that is the distribution I am most familiar with, and apt-get is the freaking bomb, but… I’d also like to run a Control Panel such as Plesk to ease the SysAdmin burden for web-related stuff — and make it easier for my dad and my former roommate to manage their own stuff — but SWsoft is behind the curve when it comes to Debian support.
So I’ll probably install Fedora under User-mode Linux to support the web stuff with Plesk. Seems better from a security perspective anyway — the apps that Plesk manages are the ones most likely to be remotely compromised, running them within a UML should provide some protection for my other applications.
So much work. And I’m so far behind on my home projects, and my business projects, and life in general. I almost miss working on a 3/4-day rotating schedule… How do people get anything done with only two day weekends?!
And by the way, I still have some Gmail invites. Leave a comment over there if you need one.
10/17/04 Update: The Gmail invites are (finally) all gone.
