Digitalquill - My Life and Times » Virtualisation

New Web Servers

Digitalquill — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:25:06 +0000

The last two months have been a real problem for my web hosting. I have blogged here before about how I have been hacked. This last week the server has hacked again and phishing software installed. I was in the process of setting up a new server anyway but this has put the pressure on again.

I have setup two new servers, one dedicated to email and the other to the webserver. I have still to setup all the mailboxes and websites, but if you are seeing this post then you are viewing this blog on the new web server.

The race is on over the next couple of days to setup all the websites again and get the DNS updated to the new IP addresses for both the A and MX records.

I think Debian 4 had significant vulnerabilities, recently the repros were all archived indicating that the developers had dropped support for it. I have therefore moved to a far more up-to-date OS in Ubuntu 10.04. I have other servers and VPS servers already running Ubuntu 10.04 so there is no problem with that at all. It is just the work involved in setting everything up again.

How To Check If You Are Ready For WordPress 3.2 If you have ready my previous post about a first view of WordPress 3.2, you will have noted that there are some significant requirements changes...
Outlook Is Unable To Download Folder (null) We have recently had an issue with outlook 2003 working with a new Courier IMAP Server. Connections would be made to the server and emails...
WordPress 3.2 Released I Hope You Are Ready! WordPress 3.2 has been released this morning, I hope that you are ready! As I mentioned in my review of the release candidate of WordPress...

Virtualbox – Part 2

Digitalquill — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:23:32 +0000

Having just posted a good write-up of Virtualbox I am having a strange problem with my Ubuntu Desktop. I decided to update it all, so ran the ‘apt-get update’ which was fine, but when I ran an ‘apt-get upgrade’ it decided it needed to download 150mb or updates. This was expected so I allowed to to go and get them, which was when the problems started.

The whole PC ground to a halt, task manager showed Virtualbox was using 100% of the CPU constantly.

I managed to get back onto the Virtualbox and cancel the upgrade which then released the CPU. However after repeating the upgrade the same thing happened.

Doing the same on the Virtual Debian works fine…

Very strange… Anyone else had any similar problems?

WordPress 3.2 Released I Hope You Are Ready! WordPress 3.2 has been released this morning, I hope that you are ready! As I mentioned in my review of the release candidate of WordPress...
Media Centre And Network Storage Solution I have spent the past week moving 100′s of terabytes of data from disk to disk, trying to find the best solution for the central...

Virtualbox

Digitalquill — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:43:58 +0000

Following my recent re-install of my desktop machine I have followed the direction we are heading at work and setup Virtualbox with several environments each with a different OS.

The Desktop PC I am running is relatively old, Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with 3Gb of RAM.

I have the following running in Virtualbox

Windows XP
Windows Vista Ultimate
Windows 7 Beta (more of that later)
Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop
Ubuntu 8.10 Server
Debian 4
Debian 4 with ISPConfig Installed (again more of that later)
Ubuntu Studio.

I have been trying to get Mac OSX working, which apparently is possible, but as yet I have had no luck.

I want to get Windows 2003 Server up and running as this will then replicate my windows server.

The main idea behind this is so that I have have environments that I can test things in before implementing on my live servers. I have been playing with ISPConfig on a virtual environment to see if there is any mileage with utilizing it. It looks promising.

The main advantage of virtualisation is that firstly you are in an enclosed, non-live environment thus no real harm can be done, and secondly if a mistake is made you can roll back to a saved point in time. It also allows me to save a copy of a basic Ubuntu or Debian setup and quickly create environments from it, meaning that testing things like ISPConfig can be done easily.

In addition to testing software, I have environments setup that are exactly the same as my live web servers, each with a copy of any websites deployed on them, allowing me to check any changes work on the most critical sites before releasing them to the live server.

I would like to be able to ‘mirror’ at least my Linux server to a virtual environment, probably on a day-by-day basis using the rsync’d archive backup.

Home Computer Network Finally Finished Recently I have posted about my tribulations with setting up my perfect network at home. A quick re-cap is that we have two Windows Media...
Media Centre And Network Storage Solution I have spent the past week moving 100′s of terabytes of data from disk to disk, trying to find the best solution for the central...
How To Check If You Are Ready For WordPress 3.2 If you have ready my previous post about a first view of WordPress 3.2, you will have noted that there are some significant requirements changes...
Disk Space Monitor Bash Script For Linux Having setup the media storage and samba shares on the network at home, I do loose some control via windows of monitoring the space left...