Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Last night, I moved e-mail service to the new hosted server. That was more or less painless. The only grief I caused myself was in upgrading Postfix as part of the process, which rendered my version of one of the configuration files incompatibly old. Once I figured that out, all was well.

Since I run the Cyrus IMAP server on the back-end, I’d been forwarding my own personal e-mail off to a separate server that does traditional spool delivery, since that’s how I like to read and manage my own mail. The goal now, however, was complete independence from my DSL line, so I had to move away from this model and consolidate spool delivery with the database-driven Cyrus model. I completed this work this afternoon.

With that, caliban.org is now completely independent of my Speakeasy DSL line. It has good bandwidth and is hopefully more or less immune to power blackouts. Reverse DNS has been set up and I have new secondary DNS servers for the domain, as the previous ones had been somewhat unreliable.

Only a few stragglers are still hitting the Web site at the old address. They’re given an HTTP 301 to send them to the new server. Within a few days, those should completely dry up.

I’m glad to have all of this out of the way before the baby arrives, as there will be precious little time available once he’s here.

Hopefully, those of you who’ve struggled with viewing our photos in the past will enjoy the increase in speed. Multi-megapixel photos should now load a lot more quickly.

If you’ve had any connectivity problems with this site over the last couple of days, that’s because I’ve been busy moving the site to a new home, over at managed.com.

Every time we move house, I have the headache of trying to keep caliban.org on the net. That’s because it’s been hosted on domestic DSL since I moved to the US, so every time we move house, I have to get DSL up and running in the new house before it’s shut off in the old one. This is a real pain.

Not only that, but domestic DSL doesn’t offer you much upstream bandwidth to serve files, which can be a real bottleneck with RPM packages and our photo gallery. Whenever the site was hit hard by crawlers, browsing the Internet from home or working over ssh from the office was agony. With our move to managed.com, that should be a thing of the past.

The Web site has already been moved, along with DNS service. The last thing to go will be e-mail, which should be completed by the end of the weekend, if not before.

Getting the site ready to roll at the new location has involved me syncing large parts of the site to my laptop, which I then bring to work, where I rsync the data over to the new server. Like I said, the upstream bandwidth of domestic DSL is pathetic, so this was the only way to transfer the data in a reasonable amount of time. To copy it from home would probably have taken a couple of weeks.

Anyway, this will free us up to move house at will. Whatever we do, the site will stay up and the e-mail will keep flowing. We’re paying $95 per month for the privilege, but I think it’s money well spent for the peace of mind it gives us.