Conrey.org

I talked about a project I was working on at the last LUG meeting to get some services of mine moved out of my house and into a “real” datacenter. My thought was to lock down my home network, and have a server at a CoLo facility or in a datacenter to host my mail, web, subversion, and associated services I use on the road. This project quickly changed as I realized the cost of putting a server in a data rack somewhere. So in order to facilitate my own desire to get this stuff moved over, and not wanting to pay a alot of money for a whole server that will sit idle most of the time, I decided to start my own Community Xen hosting project.

The guys at xen-hosting.org have a great template layed out and I’m excited to get this into action soon!

First trip out the door as a Dice employee and I’m off to LinuxWorld. Not to shabby. I wish I could report that LinuxWorld this year was a screaming success, but I can’t. Novell was there in full force, and I sat through a couple of great talks about Linux on the desktop, one in particular that stood out was a discussion about a large car manufacturing company in Europe (name escapes me at the moment) given by Guy Lunardi, the lead product manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Good information all around. What most impressed me is the hours and hours of samba/PAM/openldap hacking that I did at Rain and Hail boiled down into a button click with SLED. Whee.

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Security is a wonderful thing. I didn’t bring my conrey.org login information with me to VMworld, so I’ve got one big update, summing up the whole experience:

Monday, I got up early today and after picking up Andy, got out to the airport. Everything went well getting to the airport, and the flight out was uneventful. We linked up with another attendee flying in from Des Moines, and I offered to get give him a lift rather than having to get a taxi in LA. After landing, getting out luggage, and getting our rental, (and dropping off our hitchhiker) we headed off to get some food. We ended up going to a great Vietnamese restaurant, and I ordered a good meal. I stopped by a Chinese bakery afterwards not knowing what we were doing the next day for breakfast. Andy had never been to a Dim-Sum restaurant and after seeing a one that looked good, figured that we’d be back in the neighborhood.

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Tomorrow, Andy M. and myself are headed out to Los Angeles for VMworld. I’ve visited the TSA website, and am still boggled by the illusion of security at airports. I really don’t care for air travel anymore. I used to love flying, but the TSA has made my my last few trips a pain. Not this bad, but uncomfortable to say the least. I had to explain that not having windows on my computer wasn’t a national security risk (and that was when I was carrying a US army contractor ID), and that some people do travel with more than 2 laptops. I can avoid that at least this trip however, thanks to this work VM I’ve got ready to go. This will be my first VMworld event, and getting there aside, I’m looking forward to it. More to follow.

In the process of upgrading my mysql installation I deleted (whoops) my conrey.org database. Luckily for me I’ve been backing up (irregularly) my database and the only post lost was my “podcast listening habits” post and my “honey amber ale” post. I’ll recreate it and post it again soon.

Recently I stopped hosting some sites for a couple of friends. I had been toying around with the idea of moving conrey.org to a secure (https) server and associated mail services as well. I had been getting a rising number of IIS/MS attacks against my server, specifically to one of the vhosts, and although they were more annoying than anything else, I wanted to get some SSL love running. As I’ve painfully learned, apache2 only allows for one ssl enabled site, and so I needed to move off all of the other sites that weren’t going to be assessable after the transition. (I didn’t want any port 80 traffic allowed at all). It was very interesting telling people that a service that I had been providing for years in some cases was being halted. So I upgraded my server, installed my certificate, and here we are in all of our https goodness. I’m sure I’ll send some updates as I start taking a look at what ssl can do for this site.

CAcert.org is a community driven, Certificate Authority that issues certificates to the public at large for free. I’m going to become an assurer for them as soon as possible, and start using a certificate issued from them to secure this site.

diva software, a project written with mono, is an video editing package that is still starting up. The interface is clean, and looks like it’ll be in a position to be a great video editing tool. I’m going to be brushing up on my digital camcorder skills. Very cool.

Jokosher is an audio production tool whose byline sums up what they are “audio production made simple”. Now that I’m no longer globetrotting, and staying closer to home, I’m going to try and get more involved with some sound recording and editing for a friend of mine. As an avid listener to lugradio I’ve been hearing about Jokosher. More to follow on it.

This next sentence is going to come as a shock to my friends and family. I’m seriously considering how to get an iPod. I know, I know, *sigh*, but this next piece is REALLY cool.

Banshee is another mono project, and allow users natively in linux to manage and upload songs to thier ipods. In the past this could be done by using gtkPod, and it’s a great piece of software, however banshee’s polish is remarkable. If you’ve got an iPod, and use linux, take a look.

So I’ve been using the Hula mail and calendar server recently and am looking forward to some of the changes that are in the pipes. I’m ready for some of my family to start using a conrey.org email account, but I’m going to wait to the 1.0 release, and according to LUGRadio it’ll happen in August sometime. I hope to also be able to give my Grandparents a computer with Debian stable preconfigured and setup for email and web surfing at the same time. Trying to work out the details of setting all of this up however, as I’ll want to go ahead and get them a bare bones broadband package from Freese-Notis as well.

So I’ve finally gotten off my duff and attended a LUG here in Des Moines. Living in Central Iowa it seemed only appropriate that I attend the Central Iowa Linux Users Group Meeting. Interesting breadth of people. Not enough debian users however I opened my mouth (shocked I’m sure) and talked abit about the Linux Terminal Server Project that I’m working on at Westminister, and a bit about Hula. There were a few Mandrake (er.. I mean Mandriva) users, and of the laptops floating around a few were macs (drool). Yet something else that Ninzin will be pleased to know I want to get. I went with Greg and overall, was happy with the experience. I look forward to next month and maybe I won’t be so reserved.