Busy Busy Busy

Woo! There have been a lot of changes here at Nobreaks.ca

I’ve just completed moving hosts to Digital Ocean in favour of their OS image selection and backup/restore/snapshot options as well as a slight decrease in cost a slight decrease in hardware specs followed naturally however the new OS we are running (Fedora 21) manages software and resource interactions so efficiently a downgrade was very much in the cards without risk of harming performance or availability.

IPv6 is now used on the servers as well as some of the most up to date software I have ever used.

So far it’s been a great experience. The snapshot capabilities are stellar and the regular backups done by them are a nice safety net.

One outstanding feature I was taken totally by surprise was the fact that I can VNC into the session as it boots meaning I could utilize grub during an update of the OS for example.

Topping out at nearly 90,000 files between the two servers I manage it takes the NAS running in RAID 6 even with the gigabit connection about an hour to rsync and backup to disk from empty folders to full synchronization. But, you can never have enough backups!

Restoring to a snapshot is fantastic since I like to keep the server on the bleeding edge and sometimes that nips me in the ass and breaks something(s). Now it takes barely two minutes to restore to a previous state of my choice.

As you may have noticed I removed the links to the server_status page since Digital Ocean’s admin panel supplies up to a year of graphed statistics and I’ve also removed the glype proxy server as I discovered that 90% of the data travelling through it was simply originating out of Asia to concerning destinations which also posed a security threat.

I’ve gotten HTTP to HTTPS redirection down in a semi-classy way that has minimal impact on the site performance. HSTS is also enforced to further enhance that oh so juicy security.

I hope to be posting more in the future now that things have come and gone.

LightSpeedTaco