Over the past nine months I've been leasing a FreeBSD VPS (Virtual Private Server) to supplement my own hardware and I've just realized that the virtual machine hasn't caused me any (more) grey hair or other anguish in all that time. In my books vendors that save hair and brain cells deserve at least a passing mention.

At present I'm using one FreeBSD VPS for staging Python web apps and hosting a couple of pro bono sites. I quite frequently refer people to more full-service shared hosting firms such as WebFaction (even my brother has an account there) but personally I prefer managing the entire box - virtual or not - myself.

As I'd like to turn off some aging servers of my own, I'm hoping that virtualization from firms like ARP Networks, or on grander scale like Google or Amazon's cloud services, will save me spending some funds on equipment leases. I've tried a few "virtual" server providers over the years but I do believe this is the first time I've passed on a recommendation here in these pages.

What I like:

• OS support: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and most Linux distributions
• Decent multi-homed bandwidth with redundancy and plenty of peering agreements turned up; data center is in LA; quite good network access to Asia, Australia
• IPv6 support
• IP accessible / out-of-band console access
• Configure, build and install your own world and kernel if you like
• Great performance, terrific even if you measure performance per dollar. I can churn out > 1000 requests per second with a trivial test page with a single DB lookup, which is a darn sight better than some of my own ageing hardware is able to do.

What I wish they offered:

• a Canadian datacenter too!

The virtualization technology involves KVM (not Xen or OpenVZ) and I find that the resource allocation is very fair indeed. 768MB RAM / 20GB disk / 100GB bandwidth - all this and I get stability too for $20 USD a month.

There are plenty of really cheap virtual server offerings out there, but not very many stable yet inexpensive operations. ARP Networks is certainly one of the latter.

FreeBSDvps.com / OpenBSDvps.net will both lead you to ARP Networks which is the love child of Garry Dolley. Garry not only knows what he is doing, he actually appears to enjoy managing server and network hardware.

Everyone appreciates reliable hardware and networks, but I think the service offering will appeal most to those who can competently manage a server from the command line. ARP Networks' target market appears to be people who know what they are doing, which is good company to keep.

Yesterday my wife was chatting with my pre-teen boys about the difference between Google, FireFox, Internet Explorer and other internet nouns which sometimes get used as verbs.

She learned from our kids that our school board has new computers configured to use Bing, Microsoft's latest entry in the search engine field.

Guess what our kids do with it?

They search for Google!

To real people - do not use this email address. Automated mail harvesters will pick this up and start sending spam to it fairly quickly; I'm curious to see how long before I receive the first message. This post published 08:47 on August 30 2009.

badmail@mikewatkins.ca

I did this a few years ago and it took less than eight hours, and to this day I still receive tons of spam to that address (all of it forwarded to Spamcop).

There's a bad spam / malware (bad software) attack going on lately on the internet - if you ever get an email from what appears to be a company or organization that encourages you to download software, do not do it.

Follow this link to F-Secure.com (these are the people who write Shaw Secure for Canadian subscribers of Shaw).

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001625.html

"The type of spam runs we saw late last year (Obama and BofA) are starting to pick up again in volume. We've seen Classmates being used as a theme and two days ago it was fake Facebook messages. Today it's back to fake Bank of America certificates."

Note the level of trickery the bad guys are going to - that graphic image looks quite convincing. Imagine your less technical friends and relatives - how would they treat the message? Help them learn what to do.

When in doubt, chuck it out.

Here are some miscellaneous notes as I tweak a new virtual private server (VPS). It's a time of fear and wonder as I'm leaving FreeBSD's ample and soft bosom for the as yet unknown pleasures to be found in the arms of my new Debian lover.

HTTP Daemon:

Problem? I think it's self evident. Yes, I know you can tune Apache and yes, I've been down that road before myself, but nothing I've done to tune Apache beats a simple lighttpd implementation, at least not with my application stack.

Solution: Uninstall Apache. Install lighttpd.

As a bonus, lighttpd supports SCGI (and FCGI) natively (to my knowledge, another popular lightweight httpd - nginx - does not support SCGI natively although contribs are available) which gives you deployment options for a variety of popular and not so popular Python web application frameworks.

Incidentally, QP deployed with SCGI (whether via lighttpd or Apache httpd) provides a nice combo that would be compatible with a multi-user shared hosting environment.

One of these days I'll get off my but and migrate my weblog over, and enable comments here in doing so, in order that I can satisfy a selfish desire to ask the lazy web if anyone has worked with a reasonable webmail application developed in Python. I'd really like to avoid supporting PHP in the future and at this point I only support PHP for a webmail application.

rsyslogd

This daemon appears to be the default system logging daemon on Debian; for some reason it uses many times more RAM than the default FreeBSD syslogd, even when it isn't actually doing any remote logging.

Solution: Add a call to ulimit -s 128 in do_start() in /etc/init.d/rsyslog before the daemon is started to reduce the stack size.

DNS

bind9 is a huge monster, something not often needed for a VPS or dedicated server that might need to also be an authoritative name server for a few domains. I'm sure there is some tweaking that can be done to reduce its footprint (no threads?) but for a clean break lets try another.

Solution: MaraDNS. Simple to configure (not that bind is all that hard, but some complain just the same), fast, and small. Config file uses Python syntax (n.b. use "somevalue" rather than single quotes 'some value').

Total savings so far: 80 - 120MB (more if one factors in Apache), which is pretty substantial given many low end VPS accounts start at 64 - 128MB of RAM allocation.

Ever since Google Chrome (a web browser which like Firefox is Open Source) first came out in beta I've been using it. I'd only intended to check it out but by the end of the day I had made it my default web browser. Firefox and Chrome are the only browsers I recommend for use on Windows.

This cartoon series on Google Chrome is a slightly technical presentation on what sets the Chrome web browser apart. Your time for a quick glance will be rewarded even if you aren't a geek, if only to admire the artistry.

Heads up to package maintainers and Unix/Linux users: Depending on your system's package system you may run into problems like this build problem on FreeBSD, should you make Python 3 your base install of Python:

$ portmaster -B firefox3
 |snip|
 /usr/local/bin/python ../toolkit/xre/make-platformini.py --print-buildid > buildid
   File "../toolkit/xre/make-platformini.py", line 15
     print datetime.now().strftime('%Y%m%d%H')
                  ^
 SyntaxError: invalid syntax
 gmake[3]: *** [export] Error 1
 gmake[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla/config'
 gmake[2]: *** [export_tier_base] Error 2
 gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla'
 gmake[1]: *** [tier_base] Error 2
 gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla'
 gmake: *** [default] Error 2
 *** Error code 2

 Stop in /usr/ports/www/firefox3.
 *** Error code 1

I must admit I'd not thought of FreeBSD's ports system as being vulnerable to Python 3 changes, but of course "scripting" languages like Python (and Ruby and Perl and ...) are heavily used by thousands of package distributions.

The simple fix: Keep the 2.x line of Python on yours systems... ../bin/python will just have to point to 2.x for the time being.

As of Tuesday, we'll bring to an end our decades-old relationship with Telus. There'll no longer be a POTS (Plain old telephone system) line (with its defacto negative option billing) hooked up to our home and office.

Why? Simply put, there is better value, and service, elsewhere.

Today I revamped the Douglas Elementary and Annex Parent Advisory Council web site. I’m using it and other pro-bono sites to refine a suite of CSS templates that will be used in some other application work I am doing.

Earlier in the week, working with Families for School Seismic Safety, I customized a bulk email routine to send out a package of nicely formatted emails to parents and politicians.

Along the way I found and resolved a bug in how I’d been handling multipart/mixed multipart/alternative email messages (html/text mail with file attachments). I ended up rewriting my old mimetools based code using the newer email package which made the task very straightforward.