Some updates and Server Maintanance.
Hello everyone,
Quite a while since I made any updates here, so it’s about time.
So what has happened since last time?
Well me, Marina, Holly, Balder and Heimdal has moved to Hässelby in Sweden, it is in the Western part of Stockholm.
Here we share a large apartment with some friends, Aurelie (who also moved from Holland to Sweden.) and Göran(He moved up some months earlier.)
Move was a pain, we moved during the weekend of 27-30th of June, And well trust me driving Amsterdam-Stockholm-Amsterdam with way to little sleep in 3 days is no fun.
We have started to settle in, Marina is going to Swedish course, and I have started looking for work.
I had saved up Holidays from my previous employer, enabling me to be on Holiday from June to end of September, I have used this to get all the details arranged, including getting me some well needed rest. :smile:
And I have some great news too, In end of July actually only 2 days before my Birthdate, we found out that Marina is pregnant. This was kind of unexpected news, but still very welcome news, since the plan was to move to Sweden to start a family, although the start a family part was supposed to be a bit later, but well nature wanted it differently. :razz:
So after our calculations, expected delivery is on the 24th of March 2009.
Marina is going through some hard times, as many other pregnanat women, she is nausious, puking, difficulty eating many things, pain and general weak feeling. But luckily this should start to wear of, since she is entering 11th week now, and they say that most women start feeling better in 11-12th week.
I will kep you updated on what happends on this of course.
So another update, this more boring than babies. :roll:
With the move came a bonus, as I mentioned in the previous blogg, the server would be moved to a faster connection, well this was true, right now it is connected to a 100/100mbit Fiber connection.
Well not directly to fiber, but close, the Fiber converter is in the Fuse cabinet. 
So you should notice a slight speed improvement loading images and such on the Album, or on your page if you are hosted with me.
Another update is that I decided to learn more about Server Virtualization, for those of you who don’t know what that is well, to be brief, I have a Computer that acts as a server, This server does a lot of things, most noticibly Hosting this blog, and the album, but it also does E-mail, file server, Database server and some other things. And right now it all runs as one server, all running in the same environement.
For a home server that is fine, but for businesses, it is not a good idea, since if for example the Mail server crashes or if a hacker found a security flaw in the web server, this could spread to all the other services, and take them all down.
Before this was solved by having one or more computers for each type of service, so one computer for Mail, one for Web, and another for Database, and so on.
But that is very inefficient and expensive, both in Energy and Money.
Because usually not all services need all the resources of the computer at the same time leaving many servers stanidng doing nothing a lot of the time.
So instead someone came up with the idea of Virtual servers.
Basically that means that on one computer runs several virtual servers, all Isolated from each other.
So even if one server get’s hacked or crashes, all the others will remain unaffected.
It also gives the advantage that you can run different type of Operating systems on the same computer at the same time, for example different flavours of Linux, Windows, and Solaris.
Well i wanted to try and learn more about this, so started investigating and I found a nice open source virtualization system called Xen, unfortuantly the hardware I have does not fully support virtualization, basically as you remember some time ago I upgraded the hardware in the Server, and bought new motherboard and CPU and so on, well the CPU I got was a Pentium D 805, and this does not have the Virtualization feature, so Today I bought a new CPU called Pentium D 930.
Unfortunatly my Motherboard is too old to support the new Core2Duo or Quad processors, so had to stick with the Pentium D generation.
I picked up the last one they had in the store.
I installed it and besides having the ability to do Virtualization, it also got a bigger Level 2 Cache and it is a bit faster, 3.0Ghz, vs the old 2.6Ghz, this while still using slightly less electricity.
Now I need to collect some money to upgrade the memory also, this would give a good speed bump, since right now it is kind of struggeling with only 1GB.
I even tried to steal some memory from my old Dell PC, it has 1,5GB, so wanted to take the 1G, but it was too old. the Dell is using DDR 400, and server uses DDR2 667
So I have to go and get some new once.
Donations are as usually always welcome. :mrgreen:
Well anyway, to be able to set up Virtual servers on my server, I need to reinstall everything, since I don’t have another server to take over while doing this it means I have to take down everything while doing that.
I plan to do it this comming weekend 5, 6 and 7th of September, if it does not work out I will make another attempt in the weekend after.
Well that was all for this time.
Brian.
