CategoryTechnology

Bloggade 2013

Being held at Timico’s Newark datacentre on Wednesday 21st August, Bloggade 2013 will be a gathering of bloggers sharing tips and tricks from the world of WordPress and blogging in general.

It is being organised by Trefor (Timico), Matt Russell (WebHostingBuzz), Neville Hobson (For Immediate Release) and Andrew Grill (Kred).

The event will be mainly focused around the new WordPress 3.6 release but there will also be a datacentre tour showing the server hardware that works behind the scenes to support 1000’s of WordPress sites. Timico will kindly be providing light refreshments at a pub afterwards.

I’m hoping to be live-blogging the event on the day too, so watch this space!

For more information and to register, see http://bloggade2013.eventbrite.co.uk/. Tickets are free, but registration is required as there are a limited number of tickets.

LedBorg for Raspberry Pi

So I’ve had a Raspberry Pi since last Summer, and have seen so many accessories and expansion boards developed since, some useful and others not.

However, having wanted to do LED-based projects with my Pi, the LedBorg stood out to me.

I bought an LedBorg (sold by PiBorg), which is a small expansion board (with dimensions of L35.5mm x W16.5mm x H11.5) that plugs directly into the GPIO connectors on the Raspberry Pi. On the board, there is a single RGB LED which can be controlled either by simple lines of code in command line, or there is a GUI for those who don’t want to code.

LedBorg LED board Raspberry Pi

So what can be done with this LED you may ask? Well there are many uses. From Gmail notifications to showing the CPU temperature of your Pi.

Or you could simply use it as an ambient light just by typing a line of code in a terminal client or SSH, such as:

echo “RGB” > /dev/ledborg

replacing the RGB with the levels of Red, Green and Blue respectively –
0 -> Means channel is off
1 -> Means channel is at 50%
2 -> Means channel is at 100%

For example, this code would make the LED turn red at 100% brightness:

echo “200” > /dev/ledborg

This code would make the LED white at 100% brightness:

echo “222” > /dev/ledborg

More examples of things you can do with the LedBorg can be found here: http://www.piborg.com/ledborg/examples

If you’re interested in buying one, they’re £4.98 each with free UK delivery.

My journey from Arvixe to WebHostingBuzz

Having had my website and email hosted with Arvixe over the past few years, I’ve had ongoing issues with websites loading slow, regular downtime and general bad service, so I decided the time was right to upgrade to a better provider.

Having seen Web Hosting Buzz had a relatively local UK location, I decided to have a look at the services they could offer which included web hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers.

Rather than going for a basic web hosting plan, I decided to rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) which would give me extra processing power should I need it.

I’m on the Silver plan (£28.95/mo), which has the following specs:

VPS Silver
Disk Space: 40GB
Bandwidth: 5000GB (5TB)
CPU: 1.5Ghz
RAM: 1.5GB (Burstable to 2GB)
Dedicated IP’s: 2

I also went for the cPanel/WHM upgrade which is £6/month and well worth it as it can make the setting up of websites and emails a lot easier.

After placing the order, I received an email from the billing/admin department to confirm that the order was being processed. Not long after, I then had an email from informing me that my VPS was being installed and configured.

Once it was setup (which didn’t take long!), I asked if they would be able to migrate my old files from Arvixe over. This was no problem, and I simply gave the details of my previous provider and the rest was taken care of.

The whole process took maybe an hour (the majority of the time being the time taken to backup and copy the files). Compared to Arvixe who used to take a day to respond to my tickets and shrug off issues, I’m fairly pleased with the support I’ve had so far.

As the package provided two dedicated IP’s, I decided to set up two personal nameservers (ns1.adamowen.co.uk & ns2.adamowen.co.uk).

It’s running CentOS, and I’m hoping to use it to host my personal website, blog and a couple of other things. I’m also testing Boundary and NewRelic monitoring software with it.

Having bought the Raspberry Pi last year, as a relative newbie to the world of Linux I’m hoping to gain further Linux sysadmin experience with this new VPS.

I’ll be updating this shortly with uptime stats. After having my services hosted with WHB for a week, here are the uptime stats for my website. 100% uptime with a great ping!

Pingdom

UK site: webhostingbuzz.co.uk
US site: webhostingbuzz.com

New server

Having studied networking as a unit of my IT course at college, I’d decided after finishing the unit that I’d like to take it further. So I bought myself a server – a Dell PowerEdge 1950 to be exact!Dell PowerEdge 1950 server

 

Dell PowerEdge 1950 server

I’m looking to use the server to build up my experience of enterprise systems so will be installing VMWare on a RAID 1 configuration, then creating a number of Windows VM’s to try to get an understanding of the VMWare software and also remote management through VMWare vSphere Client.

So far, I’ve setup a switch and am running the server through the LAN network whilst I test it out. I’m mainly a Windows guy, so decided to install Windows Server 2008 R2 as I already had a basic understanding of the menus and general layout of the OS.

Possible projects involving the server include:

  • Monitoring TCP/IP connections using New Relic and Boundary – Already doing this
  • Remote accessing the server using Dell’s DRAC card (w/ dedicated NIC)
  • Configuring the server to run a DNS so that I can host websites
  • Setting up IIS web server
  • Running game servers
  • Load balancing

I’m looking to have it hosted in a datacentre in the future, but for the time being it’s on my home network running a few hours a week when I’m using it.

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