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 found that you can do rsync “in reverse” i.e. you can sync to a remote server from your local machine, all without port-forwarding or running a local SSH daemon. So with the local current directory containing just the stuff I want to sync (/bin, /etc, /home, /lib, /root, /sbin, /usr, /var) we issue the following command, which also uses sudo instead of root-SSH:

sudo rsync -azp -e "ssh -i /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa" --progress --delete --numeric-ids --rsync-path="sudo rsync" ```ls``` user@www.example.com:/

So I can rsync my existing server to my local machine, and then push that back out to the three new servers. Sometimes I love UNIX – imagine trying to clone a running Windows machine onto three other running Windows machines; with Linux its just one command!

I’ve also found that my new cat Pico is the village whore, I caught her cavorting with the dog across the road today, just laying there in the garden! She doesn’t want to stay in my house or garden now she’s discovered the big wide world.

M&D came over and we watched The Damned United, which was a pretty good tale of Brian Clough’s time as manager of Derby County/Leeds United football clubs.