I’m probably the worst person ever at sitting down and writing about what’s going on; there’s just so much and I really hate writing it all out. But nevertheless, here’s what’s been going on in the last few weeks.
Infrastructure Upgrade
I’ve finally moved away from Dreamhost; not that there was anything wrong with them in my short experience, it’s just… well, it’s SLOW. That’s really the only downfall to using them (I was only with them for a few months, but I never noticed any downtime or anything like that.)
However, I’ve moved on. I’m now running a custom setup on a Linode Xen VPS. It’s still not totally bug-free—more on that in a second—but it’s much faster, and a lot cooler. Which is all that really matters.
Now, for those of you that have read my articles, you know I’m a huge Apache fan. I’ve used it for all of my projects, and I run it on all of my servers. But I was looking for a change, so I thought I’d try something new.
The Cherokee Project
The Cherokee Project was my first choice as an alternate HTTPD. From their site:
Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, uWSGI, SSI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, Virtual hosts, Authentication, on the fly encoding, Load Balancing, Apache compatible log files, Data Base Balancing, Reverse HTTP Proxy, Traffic Shaper, Video Streaming and much more.
What’s not to love?
I set it all up (getting PHP working was quite the fiasco until I realized they had built-in tools for doing such things) and configured a bunch of vHosts, all using different PHP interpreters for a secure multi-user environment. Everything was great, until I tried to move this domain (alax.me) over. It would seem that Cherokee is great for most things, but when you start using a ton of regular expressions in redirects, it chokes itself and brings all the vHosts down. Not good.
Back to Apache
Cherokee was nice to play with, but now I’m back with Apache, and frankly, I should’ve just done that from the start. Multi-user environments are dead simple with mpm-itk (sorry Cherokee, but information sources and PHP-CGI really suck.) and I can count on it to handle as little or as much as I need and not worry. Cherokee was fast, but I need my stuff to work all the time, and Apache has proven itself over and over in that regard. Also, I like configuration files; Cherokee-admin was pretty, but honestly, I’m running a command-line OS; I should be able to do this stuff without a GUI.
Well, that’s enough about my servers for now.
Eluviis
What is Eluviis? It’s my latest project; It’s the name I’ll be conducting my business under from now on, and it’s where I’ll be keeping my grid services. If you click that link, you’ll notice it’s really nothing exciting; I’m actively working on the site (and the servers that power the technology behind it) so it’ll be up soon.
While Eluviis is actively engaged in projects for clients right now, one of the things I’m planning on releasing over there is the Superintendent. It’s still a long way off, but I’ve got some seriously cool ideas that I think people are going to like (instant push notifications? active attack detection and mitigation? yeah.) It’s going to be cool. Here’s hoping my programming skills—and my determination—can keep up with my imagination.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been thinking about posting some tutorials on various things I encounter (like how to run Cherokee as a multi-user server) so I’ll probably get around to posting those sometime soon.
That’s about it. Carry on, then.