I’m at WordCamp San Francisco today and decided that running a year old version of WordPress (on a year old version of Ubuntu Linux) was undesirable. So, with the confidence that comes from many relatively easy Ubuntu OS upgrades, I charged ahead. For (I think) the second time ever, things went badly. Here’s what I did and how I fixed it.
Continue reading “Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 (Intrepid Ibex and Jaunty Jackalope) upgrade notes”
Category: servers
CentOS 5.3 Minimal VPS Install Guide
I just did this yesterday; you can pretty much just follow my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide.
The differences are:
- When you get to the “More Minimizing” section, yum -C grouplist will show a package called “Yum Utilities” which you probably want to leave installed.
- The Deployment_Guide-en-US file is not there so you don’t need to remove it.
That’s it.
I should also note that downloading a 3.9GB DVD ISO image in order to build a ~700MB installed OS may not be very efficient. I didn’t bother looking for a network installer but that might be the way to get this done faster.
Recommended mount options for ext3
The details of the various mount options for the ext3 filesystem are fairly well documented, but as with many things in the Unix world, knowledge is far easier to come by than wisdom. That’s a pithy way of saying that I had to do some digging to find recommendations, as opposed to explanations. So here are my recommendations for ext3 users (which encompasses the majority of the Linux-using world, as far as I can tell).
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Save power and heat: spin down backup drives when idle
Here’s a tip for those of you who, like me, back up your data to hard disks instead of tapes. Backing up to the same hard disk doesn’t protect you much (if the disk failed, you’d lose the data and the backup at once), so presumably you’re backing up to a separate physical drive. That means that the backup drive need not spin 24/7. Instead, it only needs to spin at backup time.
Continue reading “Save power and heat: spin down backup drives when idle”
Retroactively Minimizing Installed Packages on CentOS 5.1
In my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide I describe how to install a very lean set of OS packages when starting from scratch. But what if the VPS is preinstalled for you by a hosting provider? There will be things preinstalled that you don’t need, which will slow down backups and updates, and waste the relatively tiny amount of disk space that VPS plans offer. So here are some instructions to help you identify and remove packages that you don’t need, when they’ve already been installed.
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