As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Four of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
I prefer to install Wordpress via Subversion, which makes updating easier. We’ll have to install Subversion on the server first:
$ sudo aptitude install subversion
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Three of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Four.
Last week I moved this domain’s email to Google Apps. Slicehost has a guide to creating MX records for Google Apps. I have a couple other domains with Google Apps, along with a couple domains hosted locally with addresses that simply forward to my primary, Google hosted, email. I also need to send mail from the server. To accomplish all of this, I use Postfix.
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part Two of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part One, Part Three, Part Four.
Now we’ve got a properly configured, but idle, box. Let’s do something with it.
Nginx is a small, lightweight web server that’s all the rage on some small corners of the Net. Apache is extremely overkill for a small personal web server like this and, since we’re limited to 256MB of RAM on this VPS, it quickly becomes a resource hog. Lighttpd is another small, lightweight web server, but I’m a fan of Nginx. Try it out.
As mentioned previously, I’ve recently moved this domain over to Slicehost. What follows is Part One of a guide, compiled from my notes, to setting up an Ubuntu Hardy VPS. See also Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
Slicehost has an excellent article repository, containing guides on a number of subjects. After building a fresh Slice, you should first follow Part 1 and Part 2 of Slicehost’s basic setup articles.
I use slightly different coloring in my bash prompt, so, rather than what Slicehost suggests in their article, I add the following to ~/.bashrc:
Yesterday I moved this domain over to Slicehost.
Ian first told me about Slicehost when we were both looking to move away from Dreamhost last November. Initially, we both intended to find another shared host, but that proved far too difficult — it seems most hosting companies have something against shared hosting with decent limits and ssh access (that last part is the kicker).
I signed up with Slicehost at the end of last year and tinkered around with it for a month or so, experimenting with setting up the server in different ways. Eventually, I found an Ubuntu-Nginx-PHP-MySQL-Postfix-Dovecot setup that I enjoyed, and one which I was comfortable administering. In the beginning of the year, I moved a couple of my domains over to the Slice. It’s been a great experience. I’m not sure why it took me 6 months to finally move this domain — my primary one — over. Running a VPS is deceivingly simple* and well worth the effort. If you’re currently running on a shared host and have some basic competency in a UNIX environment, I’d recommend giving it a shot.
In a bit I’ll post a series of guides, compiled from my notes, on how I setup the server.
* It’s deceivingly simple if you’re not running a full mail server with virtual users running around everywhere. That part was a pain. Hence, the move to Google.
Last week I outsourced my email to Google Apps.
For years, my paranoia has prevented me from moving my mail. I never liked the idea of Google parsing through each message for keywords to generate ads. In fact, I usually don’t even allow Google to cookie me. But now most of my regular email contacts have started using GPG. Enough of my mail is now encrypted that I’m comfortable with Google.
I haven’t decided yet if I prefer the Gmail interface or Thunderbird. In the web interface, I use FireGPG for signing and d/encrypting, which of courses places signatures inline. Since I’m jumping back and forth between that and Thunderbird/Enigmail, in order to maintain some measure of consistency, I’ve told Enigmail to sign inline instead of using PGP/Mime. It is a bit annoying, and will probably frighten the sheeple, but that’s the way it is for now.
So, please encrypt all email. And if you don’t, be aware that Google is reading it.
Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
… [T]he mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost on our thoughts.
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
