Servers

This site (and my other site in Danish) have been hosted on a cheap shared hosting site a few years. As shared hosting platforms go, the service and features at GigaHost was quite reasonable, but their servers seemed continuously overloaded and the site had a few issues from time to time. I’ve been moving everything from the shared hosting platform to the smallest available VPS server at DigitalOcean.

Why the move?

• Performance on shared hosting platforms never seems to amaze.
• Limited set of features - no shell access, dummy selfcare interface, reasonable features - but limited.
• Was dirt cheap when I moved in, but not as much - the VPS is actually priced lower.

How did I move the site?

The various parts of the move will probably be described in details in further posts on the site in the foreseeable future, but basically the steps included:

VirtualBox is a free tool, which allows you to run virtual machines on a host computer. Using VirtualBox you can install Linux, Windows and other operating systems to play and experiment with.

Start the process by closing virtualbox (I usually also dettach the virtual harddisk due to be resized). Go on to a shell and find the directory where the virual machines are located.

If your initial harddisk was cloened from another virtualbox, you may get an error like this:

I’m in the process of reinstalling my work desktop. One of the mandatory packages which I install once the core system is up and running is a SSH Daemon. Setting it up (on Linux Mint which I’m running) is pretty easy. To install the OpenSSH daemon go to the shell and write:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

It’s a fairly small install, so in a few seconds it ought to be up and running. Next step is editing the default config file and change a few things. Editing the config file is done by entering:

If you’re using a Debian based Linux Desktop such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint - or Debian itself naturally - you can easily create a simple text file of all packages installed on the machine.

I have a habit of removing a lot of the “extras” (junk) which comes with the basic install - not religiously, but just to keep it reasonably tidy and not have too much stuff eating up the harddisk, requiring updates (without providing any value).

Sure it doesn’t happen that often, but sometimes you might need to change the IP number of your machine running Ubuntu. Either to configure it with a static IP number on your LAN or temporarily to configure a Wifi router - the latter being my case.

The first shot at changing the ip number, was going to the “System” menu, choosing Administration and Network Tools. It sounded just about right - but it’s wrong. Sure you view settings and some statistics, but it’s all read only.