Server downtime

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Wednesday, May 11. 2005 • Category: General
Last thursday, the harddisc of my root-server, which I rent at a housing company, broke down - I only wanted to reboot the server after a software upgrade, but it did not come back. First I suspected that I trashed the Linux installation, but it turned out that the harddisc broke down. Thus the ugly downtime of my blog, my websites and even of some other people's websites hosted on this server. Even worse I was not able to receive a single mail for five days - all in all a very unpleasing situation.

On the other hand, I decided to upgrade the server to a faster and bigger model with twice as much RAM (256MB instead of the lousy 128MB before). After I informed the housing company I got a new server monday, and the installation fun began. Fortunately I made an automatic backup every night to my local file server at home, so no data should be lost. But the configuration of the new system almost drove me mad. First I wanted to use VHCS as a server management system (I used Confixx before), but it turned out that this piece of software is only useable, if every user has only one domain - or else everything will get complicated. So I decided to use SysCP, another open-source server-management system. And it turned out to be a good decision.

Now my email works, most of the web-pages are back again, but I am still busy restoring all the mysql-databases of all users. I hope the new server won't break that fast again.

Kaya

New ISP at home

Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Sunday, May 1. 2005 • Category: General
I have been a faithful customer of the biggest german telephone and internet provider (Telekom and T-Online) for years, but I have thought of switching to another provider more than once. The T-companies offer very good technology, but their prices aren't just fair any more. So finally I decided to switch my complete telephone and internet connector over to Arcor, one of the few german companies who really have their own backbone and telephone lines. Of course I was afraid that this switch will cause some trouble with the result of a dead telephone for some days - but everything worked surprisingly well, they switched over in a couple of minutes without any problems.

And the best is: Now my internet connection is two times faster (3MBit down / 512KBit up) and I pay significantly less than before! I can only recommend to all T-Online customers to think about switching to another ISP (maybe except for AOL). You can save some money and get a faster connection at the same time.
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