Title: July Meeting
Location: The Pythian Group
Link out: Click here
Description: Time to complete the virtual server.

Configuring Dovecot for secure access and configuring TLS and authenticated SMTP. At least that’s the hope. I ran through the requirements when I migrated the website and set up all of this for my own servers so we should be able to get through it in one session. All of the hard work has already been completed.

I’ve been delaying doing an upgrade to the latest-greatest until I had a few free hours. I made all the necessary backups, made a database backup and clicked on the upgrade button (This is a major revision upgrade). less than 2 minutes later, the whole upgrade is complete, the database has been upgraded and it looks like all the plugins are happy as well.

Another ringing endorsement for Wordpress.

It looks like my remaining hard drive on the old web server is finally giving up the ghost. I will be migrating everything over to the new server this weekend, so there may be additional outages when I decide to make the cut-over, but this should be a flash cut via a firewall rule change.

I was a bit surprised when I checked the site earlier and nothing happened, attempts to log onto the server were also met with no response. A quick check on the hardware and I saw the message: Disk0: Fail, Disk1: Fail on the RAID enclosure. It’s really too bad the box doesn’t support drives larger than 80GB, but it was made many years ago. It’s also too bad I couldn’t find an additional 20GB disk in my collection with sufficiently close drive parameters to fix the mirror. Oh well, I’ve been putting it off for months now, so this is the best time to do it.

The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up.

I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.” The concept is good, the timing is good and the implementation appears to be solid. It has pretty much anything you could want for a small virtual office and it offloads having a desktop support person on site. This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement and extra features, but the foundations appear to be solid and all of the basics are covered.

It seems to have propagated rather quickly. I suspect some web-caching devices may take longer, but the three different external sites I have tried all show it as up and visible. That’s rather encouraging really.

For those looking for a web host, I have managed to find a couple of Canadian ones that have reasonable rates. I’ll post some info later, as I’d like to pull a couple of sites I have in the US back to Canada. One looks really good, but doesn’t offer secure connectivity. That I can’t really deal with. Another offers SFTP, so that’s a step in the right direction. Ideally ssh is my connectivity of choice, as it makes editing go so much faster.