linuxAnother Linux Workstation
My trusty old Apple PowerBook is now running Debian. I've recorded the tweaks needed to make everything work here.
Nginx
I've just switched this site over to Nginx from Apache. The main reason for doing this is Nginx is far better suited to lightweight sites like this as it is especially fast at serving static content while using a lot less ram and seeing as I'm not doing any fancy URL re-writing or other things like that Apache was a bit overkill. The reason I went with Apache in the first place when I first started this site a few years ago was simply it was what I was used to - all the web servers I've configured over the years have been Apache servers so it was all I knew. But since switching jobs about a month back I've been exposed to Nginx and after doing a bit of reading about it have decided that this little Intel Atom box with this very lightly trafficked site would be much happier with something a bit smaller and simpler. My first thought was to go with something like Araneum as it is really tiny and efficient with very few options so securing it is pretty easy. However Araneum isn't in the Debian repositories and the only .deb package available from the Araneum website is for i386 (I'm running amd64 on this box) and I certainly don't want to rely on compiling from source each time the server is updated, so Nginx it is*.
To be honest this site sees so little traffic I could probably run pretty much any web server :-)
* I do like how Araneum provides a Haiku package though - BeOS represent!
Ubuntu 11.10
And I'm back to using a Linux workstation <3
I've recently switched jobs, leaving the telco for a web hosting outfit. In my new workplace we can choose which OS we want to use on our workstations (or even provide our own workstations - a bunch of guys are running Macs, the rest pretty evenly split between Win 7 and Linux) and I'm happily running Ubuntu 11.10 on my nice dual 22" screen rig. Well, when I say happily it's nearly all rosy - I can't say I'm thrilled with Unity. It's not that the concept is bad, or I can't work with it, no it's that it is simply a bit too buggy for my liking. The last version of Ubuntu I used was 10.10 and even then there were some regressions in regards to stability (and IPSec broke as well...) but 11.10 seems to take it to a new level, it honestly feels like I'm using a beta OS a lot of the time as I've had a few strange issues (I've "lost" windows a few times now, once I unlocked the desktop only to be greeted by a white screen, every kernel update seems to break the ATi drivers, terminal has crashed twice now...).
I'm actually thinking about installing vanilla Debian, the only thing putting me off is the fact that it would take me a day or two of tweaking to get all my apps installed and set up the way I like. I'll give Ubuntu 12.04 a whirl when it comes out in two months but if that isn't up to scratch I'll go back to tried and true Debian Squeeze.