http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

If you use or know of the Free Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix distributions, laugh with me. If not, move along, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

(via Reddit)

I’ve been managing Unix/Linux webservers now since 1999 and I’m closing the doors effective 12/1. I got into the business originally to teach myself Linux and though I’ll never stop learning, I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do. Another factor is the large amount of time I spend managing the servers and how little most people appreciate my work. I’m not talking about money but maybe a “thanks for spending 14 hours fixing my mega borked perl script that took your cluster down and affected all of your other customers when I’ve never paid you a cent in five years though I’ve raked in thousands of dollars from Google Adsense” would have been nice from time to time. Some of my hosting customers (both paid and pro bono accounts) were great and helping them with their sites was a pleasure.

But the real reason is that I just wanna get my life back. Earlier this year, I made a huge decision to leave a promising upper management position and it has paid off so far. So this is phase 2 of the life reclamation project. I no longer want to have to limit my hiking or cycling or just hanging out with my friends just becuase one of my servers might do down or Cpanel is going to release a new version that will likely break everything.

Additionally, the market and economics have changed considerably. What was once a pretty profitable and fun trade has become a mere commodity with the advent of affordable grid computing and cheap datacenter space.

This was an incredibly difficult decision (unlike the job thing) because this will have a significant impact on my paying and non-paying customers. For all of my customers, I will refund every cent of the money you paid me in 2006 and will provide extensive migraion assistance (i.e. I will do it for you if needed) to minimize the impact. The target date for shutdown is December 1st. If you host a website with me, you have received an e-mail prior to this and I will be giving you a phone call on Monday. I highlyrecommend the GS product from MediaTemple. 100 GBs of storage and 1 TB of monthly transfer. Plus, these guys really know what they’re doing. (note: I have no affiliation with MediaTemple nor received any compensation from them). They’ve been around for a long time and have a great reputation.

As for this blog, it will likely relocate to Blogger or Typepad, details will follow soon and you will be able to read RCS without changing your bookmarks.

Adboe has finally released Flash Player 9 for Linux. Ok, so it’s only a pre-release version but seems to work fine for me and it’s about time. A lot of sites had migrated to Flash 9 and us Linux users were SOL.

To install the Firefox plugin as root in the CLI:


# cd /usr/src
# wget http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_linuxplugin
# tar -xzvf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz
# cd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/
# cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.7/plugins


The above commands extracts the archive and copies the binary plugin to the Mozilla Firefox plugins directory.

Restart Firefox. Enjoy.

If you’re using the Bourne Again Shell (bash), type:

history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r -n

This will print them commands you used most often to your terminal. Why is this handy? Well if you see a command that you use often and it’s fairly long, it might be time to make an alias or perhaps you see a group of commands that you can concatenate the output using pipes and a single alias. You don’t need to be root to do this obviously but I happened to have a root terminal open on one of my webhosting machines to make this example.

In my example, you can see that I hit vnstat (a simple yet incredibly accurate bandwith monitor) a lot in addition to a custom perl script I wrote to graph it’s output using rrdtool. I had some serious bandwidth concerns a few months ago due to a few of my customers’ sites that had become incredibly popular in a very short period of time.

About a month ago, I had a terrible dream that there had been a fire in my house and though I’d managed to save the kids and Amy, I felt as if I’d lost something irreplaceable. I didn’t actually solve that in the dream (from what I can remember) but on the way into work the next day, I realized that I would have lost all my digital pictures and thousands of digital documents I had created over the past 10 years. Sure, I’d been smart to back everything up multiple times on RAID 5 disk arrays (I’ve had many hard disks fail) but the problem was that all of this data was stored in one physical place. A fire, flood or major earthquake would mean losing them forever.

Offsite storage isn’t new to me (I back up all of my client’s websites in two different locations (one East Coast and the other on the West Coast) which has saved my ass on a few occasions. Also, at the time, I managed an Engineering group for a major ISP where we took data backup extrememely seriously.

My were requirements weren’t simple:

1) At least RAID 5 (preferably RAID 6 and NO SOFTWARE RAID)
2) Secure datacenter in a geologically and politically stable part of the world
3) Good, redundant connectivity
4) Support for rsync, sftp, ssh, Webdavs, smb and fuse (specifically sshfs so I can mount it locally on my Linux box)
5) A decent TOS (terms of service)

A week’s worth of searching led me to rsync.net. They’re a little pricey ($1.80 per gig per month) but these guys know what they’re doing and only doing this one thing (most other providers also did shared web hosting). They have a TOS that really favors the privacy of the customer and secure file transfer is their priority. They support all the protocols I required above and just yesterday added Dupliclity which is basically rsync + gpg. Kick ass.

I’ve been using them for a little over 3 weeks now and they get 5 stars. SSHFS mounting has worked flawlessly and they even helped me with some really crazy stuff I was trying to do with rsync. It took me only a few hours to write a shell script that rounded up all the changed data on my machines and NAS arrays and automatically upload them to my rsync share.

If you are serious about protecting your data, sign up with rsync, they’re really the only game in town.