I’ve recently been interested in experimenting with Hashicorp’s Nomad for deploying/running apps as an alternative to the the somewhat convoluted combination of Docker + ansible I currently use. Since I primarily use a Synology NAS for running Dockerized apps, my first hurdle was coming up with a way to somewhat sanely install the nomad server/client on a Synology. I found nomad-spk that was promising, but wasn’t compatible with the latest major version of the Synology OS (aka DSM7).

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Finally got around to migrating the blog from Jekyll/Octopress to Hugo. I managed to preserve the RSS feed URL, so it was a fairly smooth migration aside from a blip when feed readers thought all the posts were new again it. I’ve still got some work tweaking the theme and category/tag pages, but seems to be working out pretty well.

Welp. Seems I forgot to test out my RSS feeds in Hugo, so I’m reverting to Octopress until I have time to sort that out.

A few years ago, I’d migrated from Wordpress to a static site generator for my blog as part of migrating off a shared web host to a VPS. I’d started with Octopress since it had been getting a fair bit of buzz at the time. I was pretty happy with the rendered output, but the underlying software had its flaws. The author (Brandon Mathis) highlighted some of those flaws in his post on the road to Octopress 3.

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So a while back I started looking at alternative VPS hosting providers. I was impressed by the service Linode provided, but started wondering if I’d get better bang for my buck going elsewhere. At the time, I was paying $20 / month for their smallest Xen VPS or $25 / month if I wanted their backup service. My hosting needs were modest, especially since I’d migrated just about everything from dynamic stuff with a DB backend to primarily serving static content. So I could really get away with something with leaner. I shied away from the extremely cheap OpenVZ providers, and tried a couple of different KVM VPS providers before I found one that offered a balance of cost, reliability, and performance.

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Yet another time of migration (blog-wise)… TextDrive -> Joyent -> TextDrive 2 My web hosting has been a little up in the air recently (see Slashdot: Joyent Drops Lifetime Account Holders). I paid a few hundred bucks several years back (2005) for “lifetime” web hosting at what I perceived to be a cool up and coming company (read: they claimed to be pushing to support a lot of the flashy new web tech that wasn’t well supported by most shared web hosting providers at the time).

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I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but I’m finally doing it. When I first got into having a website, I’d registered my domain name with GoDaddy based on some recommendations at the time. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of reasons to move away from them, but never quite got around to it. But their support for SOPA has finally pushed me to transfer my domains elsewhere. For now, I’ve moved most of my domains over to Namecheap and the ones I couldn’t over to Name.com. I’m sure GoDaddy doesn’t really give a rip that I’m leaving (since I only had a few domains with them), but their support of SOPA has prompted others to move 100s of domains elsewhere and some big clients to threaten to move 100s to 1000s more if they don’t change their stance on this lousy piece of proposed legislation (e.g., see this Reddit thread.

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So my hosting provider (was textdrive, now Joyent) is working on retiring all their old FreeBSD servers they were leasing. Yeah, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could lease a server like that. Anyway, they’re buying up fancy “Shared Accelerators” (8-core Opteron boxes with 4GB RAM/core from Sun running OpenSolaris) backed by SunFire x4500 Thumpers running ZFS. I’d started off with this provider a couple years ago as part of a VC campaign (give us a large wad of cash, and we’ll give you an account for as long as we’re in business), and I’d upgraded at some point when they had a similar campaign that bumped up the specs on my hosting account and added their Connector service (group email, calendar, etc services with their own chunk of attached storage) and Strongspace service (large reliable online backup storage accessible via sftp/rsync over ssh/web over ssl).

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Well, I’ve gotten the critical stuff transferred over. Stuff that’s up and running: DNS now points to my new server. Email has all been transferred over (hooray for IMAP!). My databases are up and running (although not set up quite how I’d like). The blog is functional (along with most of the site, since I’m using WordPress as a basic content management system for a large portion of the site).

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Looks like I’m finally going to get around to moving Malkier over to a new server. iPowerWeb has been decent as far as hosting providers go, but they’re clearly targetting a different market than whatever category I fall into. They provide (read: push) a bunch of web business stuff, but don’t seem to be quite as concerned with cool webtech or security. The server I’m on has been hit by security flaws on a few occasions, resulting in either server downtime or mass defacement of the php source throughout my site… inserted spam code in every php file on my site… Funny because it pointed to a non-existent web address and was written in such a way that every page it was on was broken and wouldn’t even render in a browser.

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