Tuesday 23 October 2012

Random interesting system thing of the day

Just a short one. When you have delayed job (Or anything with lots of children)t gets tedious writing ps aux | grep del then 100x kill -STOP 11992, kill -STOP 11993, kill -STOP 11998...
Turns out pkill takes regex, meaning you can pkill -STOP delayed which will pause everything with delayed in the process name.
Also pgrep -l delayed finds all PID's of processes with Delayed in it.
Really handy!

Reference: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_pkill.htm

Sunday 21 October 2012

VPS experiance & Domain Name Registrar

This has been a busy week. I acquired a Virtual Private Server, a Domain and I have been having my first experiences with Apache2 since I am normally an Nginx man.

Firstly my reasons for getting a VPS are a few:
I did not want to leave my computer on all the time.
If I did leave my computer on, my IP is not static.
The electric bill would be more expensive than a small VPS anyway.
My main computer is windows so I would not get any of the lovely *NIX goodies through SSH.
A VPS is on all the time if I choose.
It is more online storage.
I wanted a personal GIT server.
I wanted to learn more about servers and networking.

So with this in mind, I started my search. Because I wanted it for personal use and GIT, I was looking for hard drive space over bandwidth or transfer limits.
A friend of mine at the university owned fusevps but sadly when I looked it appeared to be nuked from orbit.
My next stop was a VPS offers list: Low End Box, I like helping the local economy so I restricted my search to UK hosting and found several great offers from EaseVPS, CastleGem, Edis and MiniVPS. MiniVPS's offering fitted my criteria best and so I chose them to be my first VPS.

They have a nice control panel to change Operating Systems, shutdown, restart, change hostname, see usage  graphs and the like which is nice, and their installs come with Apache2 running automatically which I did not expect. Overall I like the machine, it feels speedy enough and I have Gitolite set up so it really has everything I was going for.

So onto the next thing.

I managed to get my hands on bookofgreg.co.uk for a reasonable price from 123-reg (I didn't search around too much except to avoid godaddy), someone already had bookofgreg.com which is a little strange to think someone might be using my alias but seems it is not actively used at the moment. Using 123-reg's control panel I managed to set the DNS to point everything but mail to my VPS so I can happily use git@bookofgreg... now. It was at this point when checking the DNS was pointing to the right place I discovered Apache was running until it gave it's "everything is Ok" message when going to the browser.

Overall it is surprisingly quick, simple and easy to get a Domain name pointing to a VPS. Both VPS provider and Domain Name Registrar have everything automated to a T and it is such a quick and easy system. Very pleasantly surprised. Next Step, mail server setup (This is going to be HELL!)