Mon, 21 Feb 2005

Blog is back

Shortly after posting about referal spam killing my box a few times in two days, things got a lot worse and the box would go down every hour or so. As natura.oskuro.net is, besides a home webserver, a NAT box for my father's Internet connection, having the box more dead than alive was quite unacceptable, and I had to stop Apache2 until I found another place for the blog.

Mako, jacobo (who is back into blogging, for the joy of many in #gpul) and a few others offered temporary hosting for this site while sto and I decide on renting a UML-based box or whatever.

Before moving somewhere else, I tried a few of the last options at the old, slow box, and it seems PyBlosxom caches are really working, at least for now. Despite having gone over a few spam attacks since Saturday, it looks like the box is cutting it quite ok. mrtg reports a few high load peaks over the night, but nothing that kills it. I used the dbm-based pyblosxom cache driver, and the first difference is that apparently I don't get one process per request anymore, and only that prevents running out of memory. I've had one case where the blog would be empty, which was fixed by just rm'ing the cache db. If it happens again, I'll try with the entrypickle cache driver to see if there's any improvement.

Anyway, even if it still works, it's obvious a Pentium 150Mhz is not enough these days, and will have to find something cheap to host my stuff as soon as possible. In the following days I will finish the migration to a new domain name, which will be a start. oskuro.net doesn't make much sense anymore, and quite probably I will let it expire next year.

Are you looking for a new box to use as a server / gateway?

I have a Compaq Proliant 3000 with 500MHz processor, 1GB RAM and ~ 50GB hard disk space I'd be willing to give you, as you are a needy Opens Source developer.  I have a spare 500MHz processor so if you get a Voltage Regulator Module you could run it as a dual processor box.
It is a it noisy, and large!  If you want to see a photo, let me know.

The only thing I'd have to sort out is shipping, I'm in Ireland.

Phil

Posted by Phil Trickett at Mon Feb 21 22:12:33 2005

Phil, thanks for this generous offer!

Unfortunately I have to decline, as the problem is not so much hardware, but a stable location where I can host the box with decent bandwidth. I think I'll have to pay for something in the near future, as I'm using a 512/128kbps ADSL link for this site right now. Maybe we manage to find some friend working at an ISP that can make a good deal.

I'm delighted by your kindness, anyway. Thank you!

Posted by Jordi at Tue Feb 22 11:15:25 2005

Ok, that is no problem.

If you know of anyone in Ireland who can give you cheap or free rackspace let me know.

It is just my way of giving something back to delopers of the software I use every day.

Phil

Posted by Phil Trickett at Tue Feb 22 23:17:35 2005