December 2014 Archives

Even though I haven’t been writing in public, I’ve still written 58,000 words this year [0]. But those words haven’t been public; they’ve been in Day One, a journaling app I use on my iPad and Mac.

All this writing, only for me. A hundred words here, a few hundred there. What is it doing for me? Am I any better as a writer? I judge I’m a little worse than I was a few years ago. I think that’s because I’ve been writing for myself, and all those words are first drafts, never subject to revision or critical thinking.

On the other hand, they’ve kept me in the habit of writing. Any writing is better than no writing. And I will probably mine some of those words and revisit them here.

[0] I’ve been very prolific in my journal in the last year. I have entries in Day One going back four years; 124,000 words in all. So 58,000+ words in 2014 is 46% of the total.

One Saturday morning a month ago my VPS stopped accepting mail. It looked like my server had run out of disk space, but deleting files didn’t seem to make any difference. (Delete some stuff, run df, find myself still at 100%. Grrr.) I opened a ticket with RapidVPS, and it took them a few hours to figure out that the physical server hosting my VPS had run out of disk. Not good!

I liked RapidVPS [1]. For years I’ve been paying $14.34 a month for a VPS with 7 gig of disk space, but nowadays you can find better deals with providers that give you more features. RapidVPS made the classic mistake of any company that hasn’t kept up with competitors: reminding a customer that they have other choices.

Digital Ocean is one of those competitors. Last spring they had a promotion where they gave $50 credit for signing up. They make it trivially easy to create and destroy VPSs, and you only pay for the time the server is up.[2] Digital Ocean’s cheapest server is $5 month, so bringing up a server or two for a few hours costs a few pennies.

Back when I signed up with RapidVPS in 2007, I had to pick a Linux distribution. CentOS had a good reputation, and CentOS 5 had recently been released, so that’s what I went with. The nice thing about CentOS is they support releases forever, which is good because upgrading CentOS is a pain; you basically have to reinstall the OS from scratch. Seven years later I’m on CentOS 5.11.

I’ve been thinking about upgrading for the past couple of years. The big thing that has been holding me back is setting up email again. Running your own email server is quite doable if you’re willing to do the sysadmin work, but it’s still a lot of things to set up: spam filtering, IMAP, webmail if you want it .. and if your server goes out for any reason, as mine did a month back, you’re really in trouble [3]. Making it worse, I’d done all my setup in EXIM, but EXIM packages were not available in the EPEL repo last time I looked[4]. I was looking at moving to PostFix .. but that made the barrier even higher. I actually got as far as setting up Postfix and IMAP on a Digital Ocean VPS, but the prospect of setting up and training spam filters again didn’t look like much fun.

In the end, I decided to pay FastMail to handle that problem for me. $40 dollars takes care of email for an entire year; that’s $3.33 a month, and it’s run by sysadmins who are paid to make sure it stays up[5].

Even without email, I still have a few services on my server - including this blog, so I went ahead and set up a new server on Digital Ocean. I was planning to upgrade to CentOS 6, but I delayed long enough that CentOS 7 was released, so I went with that.

The last thing I brought up was this blog. I’ve let the poor thing sit there for too long. Time to start using it again.

Welcome back to me.

It's been six and half years since I published anything on this blog. 2377 days, to be precise, and you know I like to be precise.

There are many reasons for that, both technical and non-technical. I may or may not get into those. (Probably not.)

I'd like to say I'm back to blogging, but only time will tell.