maniacmartin

Compsoccers by definition (read: stereotype) are not born to lead groups of people, or even to interact with others. And you can’t program guest speakers to appear to give talk.

dd if=/dev/speaker of=/dev/compsoc doesn’t really work. We are a species which does not readily arrange important guest speakers or take responsibility (read: blame) for things that may happen.

From Will’s desperate emails, it seems there are no second years who have any interest in being symlinked to the name. Who will give in to doing the right thing? Time will tell.

This morning I got an email from my server’s hosting company saying that they are ceasing to trade. My server will be unplugged on 1st March. Its now 27th February. What a lot of notice.

Now I’m scrambling to backup my data (with the help of the JANET backbone), order a new server and fully set it up with DirectAdmin and do DNS propagation, as well as copying things like Mysql databases and IMAP email accounts across.
Wish me luck
(and if you ever see servers from a Nicholas cloutier, run a mile)

As predicted, this blog is being neglected, as DaveM pointed out to me recently. So, at the risk of boring you with useless news, I am posting an update:

Firstly, Andrew and I noticed a distinct lack of free “works-out-of-the-box” web hosting control panels recently. (Like Plesk, cPanel, DirectAdmin). We tried various free ones on a Debian Sarge box, with no great success.

web://cp wouldn’t even complete its install (and hasn’t been updated since 2005).

VHCS2 installed OK but broke Apache2’s config files whenever a change was made, and its interface only allows you to do the basics.

AlternC showed promise and installed, but then we were stuck and its documentation is in French.

(And no, webmin is not a web hosting control panel that fits our needs)

It surprises me that there is no easy-to-install, open-source package to do what is a very common problem. What would be nice is something where you can edit
/etc/apt/sources.list

and then type
apt-get install packagename
and it would pull in dependancies and set it up for you.

There is clearly a gap in the market for this.

In the real world, Ong’s lectures and still as boring as ever, but at least its Week 6. That came round fast. I still have some Linear Algebra to tidy up and then we’re on the home straight.

Update: ISPconfig - jsut check their online demo. The interface is eeeeugh. No way