The Random Ramblings of a Sysadmin

Changes are afoot at my little abode on the interwebs, first of all I've decided to ditch Wordpress for Drupal and to change my primary domain for this little collection of random ramblings. I'm also half-stride in a server move and many other changes, great and small.

First things first, the domain name. Twelveletter.com is a .com domain name, which has twelve letters before the .com. It's a twelve letter .com domain, it's twelveletter.com (I guess you get it already, no need to go on and on and on and...). Also, the recent case about Orango.dk (Orangogate, if you will) clearly showed that ordinary non-commercial use of a domain is not, no matter what duration it has had, considered to be of any relevance if the other party to a .dk domain dispute is a business. For more on Orangogate or the doubtful state the Danish domain dispute system, those who can read danish should read what Czar has to say on the matter. Arkolog.dk will not go out of use, but I will ensure that my channels of communication will survive even if a business should decide to have a go at the domain I've held since 2003.

The change from Wordpress to Drupal is all about convenience, as Drupal is actually overkill for my simple purposes. I had amassed an odd hodge-podge of sites and systems on the old server, and decided to make a clean sweep for the move. The one site that would be the most trouble to move to a new CMS got to decide which way the others went, and as I'd gotten a fair bit of exposure to the inner workings of Drupal a few years ago, it seemed a logical choice to migrate everything else to a new multi-site Drupal install. This way I save on disk space and, more importantly, on administration time. With a multi-site Drupal setup, I get a single point of file upgrade with new releases, and a homogenous procedure for the single-site aspect of upgrades (database and module upgrades). From having several different systems covering a multitude of sites to having one system covering all sites on the server will save oodles of time.

I'm also back home in several ways, and did consider the title "Honey, I'm hooome" for this. I'm back on OpenBSD after a good year or so on Debian, and boy does it ever feel good. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy using Debian, but I'm an OpenBSD guy at heart. I did briefly consider FreeBSD, but settled on OpenBSD in the end. Familiarity is such a nice thing when being pressed for time. I'm also "back home" in the sence that I've moved the server from Hetzner and back to Armada Hosting. I've been very happy about Hetzner, but the very few network outages I've had there have been more than I like. Network outages are to be expected in hosted environments, as on the internet as such - five years in the hosting business has taught me that in ways that makes me sure I wouldn't want repeat lessons. Hetzner have been good hosts, with excellent levels of information and support, but in the end, my paranoid side won me over, and I started looking for a setup I could really trust. For that, what better than one I'd helped design and build over the years spent working at Armada Hosting? Finally, Armada Hosting offered me one thing I was unable to get at Hetzner: Native IPv6. Tunneled IPv6 from HE Networks is perfect for my DSL at home, and for many other small projects, but not for servers. With the Armada Hosting setup and native IPv6, my issues with regards to IPv6 connectivity have finally been resolved.

I'm also brewing up a new mail setup, but that will probably be a story for another posting.