Well if the DNS has propagated properly I’m writing this on my new virtual server!
Our co-lo hosts put their prices up and then decided to get out of the market altogther, so the Netra will be winging its way back to us, and I’ve gone for a UK-based VPS which costs a fifth as much and seems to perform better – well sun4u is pretty dated hardware compared to a slice of core2quad xeon!
I’m thinking of moving my fileserver from CentOS 5.2 to something more up-to-date. Partially due to 5.3 being pretty late, but also because the NIC bonding seems to be flaky due to the old kernel I guess.
The main requirements that have to be met by a replacement distro are:
I can’t use Ubuntu Server as it has no X11, I can’t use OpenSolaris as it won’t work with the printer/scanner, I can’t use Fedora10 as it’ll need updating in six months.
After my good experience with NIC bonding on Fedora7 I thought I’d implement it on my CentOS 5.2 fileserver. Big mistake.
On top of the built-in 100BaseT NIC, I installed a second gigabit NIC, which was still an r8169 same as the other one, but a different brand card. That of course caused random switching around of the order of the network cards, so bond0 wouldn’t come up. As you can’t put the MAC address in the config file when using bonding, and my motherboard is modern so auto-assigns IRQ’s, I ended up having to blacklist the forcedeth module to prevent the built-in NIC coming up, leaving just the two gigabit cards.
I tried out Debian 5.0 “Lenny” today, quite impressed that VirtualBox guest additions worked flawlessly once gcc/make/kernel-headers were installed. Its funny though, only Debian would make a new release where most of the software is already a year out-of-date!
I also tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, which I guess is what will become Solaris 11 – not as Linuxesque as I thought it would be, although we do have bash as root’s shell, and a proper package manager, not just useless old pkgadd. I was quite impressed with TimeSlider, which is essentially a rip-off of Apple’s Time Machine, enabling time-based backup/restore based on ZFS snapshots – all nicely integrated into Nautilus. Also VirtualBox guest additions worked much better than under proper Solaris 10. Screenshot.
Been a while since my last post.
Today I tried out my new mountain bike. I cycled to M&D’s and back, it wasn’t too bad despite the hills, only took 10mins. I do seem to be suffering now though – inhaling all the cold air has screwed with my lungs it seems.
Dad and I have been collecting free firewood from a neighbour, which is nice (although very hard work lugging around) but now we’re itching a bit, so hopefully don’t have poison oak or something. On the way there today we decided to take a shortcut and I ended up getting stuck in a waterlogged ditch, luckily right next to a tractor which pulled us out. I’ll never moan about slow tractors on the road again!