I’ve got one of my new VPS’s setup today. Just got to wait for reverse DNS to propagate and get iptables sorted and NTP enabled: vzctl set <veid> --capability sys_time:on --save vzctl set <veid> --iptables ipt_state --save I’m not going to switch over until I get the German servers up and running though, as the network speed of the American server isn’t so great (a few more hops I guess).

I’m thinking of moving my virtual server to another provider as my current host has quietly sold his business! Looking around I’ve found a provider that can give me two German servers and a free American one for about 12ukp a month, so I could split off email/spam/webmail onto one server (and re-enable the memory/CPU-hungry ClamAV) and web/database onto another, with the US one for redundancy. I’ve been playing around with OpenVZ again, and have cloned my existing VPS clone twice, and fiddled with the services, so I effectively have the three server model above running on my local machine inside a VM.

I’ve been playing with OpenVZ, which is an opensource fork of what is now Parallels Virtuozzo, essentially its a container system similar to FreeBSD jails, or Solaris zones. I have managed to install it inside of VirtualBox running CentOS 5.3 64-bit, using these instructions from the CentOS Wiki, which basically boils down to: disable SELinux, enable IP forwarding, stop yum overwriting the OpenVZ kernel with the CentOS one, then, as root (on the host node):

I wasted most of yesterday morning fiddling with my GPS. It seems the car charger is knackered, or more accurately, the stupid centre-negative “pin-in-hole” socket I guess is iffy as sometimes the red charging LED comes on and sometimes the charging indicator comes on the screen but not the LED, that’s always breaking on these GPS’s, its such a stupid connection. Anyway, luckily my GPS can also charge by its USB port so I can charge it via the PC, albeit rather slowly as the car adaptor is 6volts 1.

I just upgraded the BIOS on my Intel DG43NB motherboard. What a malarkey! You go to Intel’s website and they’ve helpfully provided a bootable CD ISO for Linux users, so you don’t have to use their Windows utility. Well it turns out the CD isn’t actually bootable, dunno what they’ve done but going back at least five versions it seems its not bootable, so good QA there, plenty of forum posts about it too, so that’s three CD-R’s wasted.