Tellytart’s World

Virtual Servers Rule!

Woohoo! Today I’ve finally migrated my old Linux server to a new installation running inside VMware on my Windows 2k3 box (my Windows Home Server box).

There were a couple of hitches, The time kept running slow. This was due to the way VMWare worked with the AMD processor that changes it clock speed depending on load. A couple of tweaks to the VMWare config file later, and the time is now running properly.

All my users, home directories and e-mail have now been migrated across, and all seems to be working fine, except for one of my websites, which was written for PHP4 and seems to take exception to PHP5! Oh well, it needs a re-write anyway, so that’ll be the next task.

Global Warming

The reason for moving from my nice stable real linux box to using a virtual server is partly because it was running on very old noisy hardware (and it’s sat in my living room), and partly to do my bit for global warming, where I can run two servers in the same PC rather than having two separate stand-alone servers.

So now I have only one PC in my living room that’s turned on 24/7, which should help reduce my electricity bill and the PC noise in here!

I’ve now opened up my shop online. At the moment only two items are available, a CD of Jo Caulfield and a DVD of the Ornate Johnsons. UK delivery of the CD is free, and the DVD is only £1. International delivery for both items is £2. I accept Paypal on this site. If you don’t like paypal, feel free to browse to their websites and order it from there, where I accept Nochex (UK only).

Happy shopping!

Jo Caulfield’s Website
The Ornate Johnsons Website

Hi-Grade have just announced a new Windows Home Server box, giving us in the UK more choice now. For more details head over to We Got Served for the links and they’ll post a review soon too!

 According to the Hi-Grade website, you can also customise the box, so the current £450 model can have more larger drives added, taking it from 2×500GB drives to 4×750GB Drives, but will cost a whopping £968!

I’ve been playing with Windows Home Server for several months now. Originally taking part in the official Microsoft beta test programme, and now running the full version.

It is one of the most useful pieces of software I’ve come across. It enables you to store all your documents, photos, movies etc. in one place, for easy access from any of your networked PC’s at home. That’s not the best part however – the best bit is the backups, all right, there are two best bits, the other being the folder duplication – more on that later.

WHS enables all your PC’s to be backed up, every night, without fuss. Because it uses what Microsoft call “Single Instance Storage”, the backup files are kept to a manageable size. Should you accidentally delete a file, you can quickly and easily go into the backups for yesterday, last week or even last month to retrieve the file. If you have a hard drive crash, you can simply replace the hard drive, insert the bootable restore CD, and restore the latest backup onto your new hard drive within a matter of an hour or two, and be back up and running as if nothing had happened!

The second feature is very clever – folder duplication. If you have more than one hard drive in the WHS, the server will make sure that for any folder you’ve turned duplication on for, it will store every file twice, (transparently to the user), to ensure that a single drive failure won’t destroy all your data. You can add storage whenever you like, and WHS will just start using it, no configuration necessary.

For more information, have a look at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

http://www.wegotserved.co.uk

Here’s my JBU picture, as drawn by Joe Phillips, and will be appearing in his book, Joe Boy University. The book is due to be published towards the end of this year.

Go to http://www.joephillips.com/ for more details on Joe and his work.

Just setting up my new website and blog using Dreamhosts. Will add more soon.