Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager: "Host not responding"
Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager, or VMM, is a slick piece of tech that smoothly enables users to control virtual machines spread out across multiple hosts, including, of course, localhost.
Well, that was rough
Just upgraded my VPS server. Unfortunately, it wasn’t smooth, not by a long shot. The usual do-release-upgrade got me into quite the pickle, trying to take my out-dated Ubuntu 9.04 server to Ubuntu 9.10. I think a big part of the hassle was due to the way my VPS is hosted here on Linode.
Someday...
While skimming through Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager v2.2 help file, I came across this in bold red text:
Strange Difference Between Debian and Ubuntu
While setting up my file server, I encountered an odd difference in what I was seeing on my Ubuntu server, versus what I was told works perfectly on Debian. Specifically, on the latter, you can mount --bind a directory and make it read-only at the same time, but on Ubuntu mount --bind explicitly cannot change the mount options, and the same operation (mount -o bind,ro ...) requires two distinct commands (mount --bind ... && mount -o remount,ro ...)!
Oh software RAID, how I love you!
Recently, my file server suffered a hard drive failure. Fortunately, as was the primary purpose of said file server, I had backups and thus lost no data. But, instead of simply replacing the failed disk, I’m taking the opportunity to upgrade and rebuild the thing, and doing a few things differently.
WordPress on a LEMP Stack
For years, I’ve run everything web-based on the standard LAMP (or, on occasion, WAMP) stack. I never really thought much about it, to tell you the truth: It’s what everyone seemed to be using, and it worked, so why question it?
New Look!
So if you haven’t already noticed, the site is now using a new theme. I think this one feels cleaner and more friendly than the old one. What do you think? Leave your feedback in the comments, including suggestions for alternative themes if you have any.
New Software
The server’s running on new software now. Replaced Apache with nginx, and am now using PHP via PHP-FPM. I may remove the latter, though, in favor of just the basic FastCGI interface – this isn’t exactly a high-traffic site, so doesn’t really need FPM per se.
Trying Something New
I’m trying out a new service that uses a CDN-like technology to both increase this site’s security as well as simultaneously improving page load times. They’re still in beta themselves, so the site may behave unpredictably in the meantime; let me know if you encounter any issues and I’ll pass them along to their support folks (who have already impressed me by responding within minutes to a bug I reported). As for who they are, they want to keep things quiet until they make a big announcement at a tech conference, so I’ll respect their wishes and not name them yet.
This is Intolerable
I normally won’t be getting political on this blog, but I came across this story and was absolutely floored. Whether or not you support gay marriage, you have to agree that the blatant disregard for due process, existing legal statuses and rights, and simple human decency is frankly appalling! The actions Sonoma County undertook here have no justification, and the end result was an old man who’d lived an amazing life was forced to spend his final months in forced isolation while all his material possessions - keepsakes collected throughout his life - were stripped away and sold off for mere pittances. Meanwhile his partner was forced into a care facility and held there against his will, denied the right to be there for his loved one’s final moments.