I’ve been using my previous hosting provider (PowerVPS) for over 10 years now! They had incredibly reliable service so I never switched. But for the past few years so many smaller companies have been providing much more competitive options. However I was just too lazy to make the switch. Just for fun: the last tweet by @PowerVPS was to me from the last time I purchased a server from them!

I’ve been doing some development for some embedded Linux devices which only support ftp and telnet. In order to automate transfer of binaries from my Fedora development host to the target embedded device I’m using this handy ftp script: pushftp.sh #!/bin/bash # arg1 = dest hostname # arg2 = local file # arg3 = dest dir HOST=$1 SRCFILE=$2 USER=root PASSWD=password #DESTDIR=/usr/local/data DESTDIR=$3 ftp -inv $HOST<<ENDFTP user $USER $PASSWD cd $DESTDIR bin put $SRCFILE chmod 755 $SRCFILE bye ENDFTP Then I added something like this to my Makefile after cross-compiling:

(Note: For the purpose of this post CentOS is equivalent to RHEL) It has been about 2 and 1/2 years since I built a dedicated server and chose CentOS instead of Fedora. Since I installed CentOS 5.1 I have used the upgrade process 4 times with no problems bringing me to version 5.5 with practically no re-installation, re-configuration or troubleshooting upgrade issues. This is the goal of enterprise linux. A long term stable solution with no major changes to preserve compatibility with every piece of software that was provided since it was released (in this case April 2007).

As I mentioned previously, I run many sites on my web server. Yesterday I decided to clean up some sites that their owners had neglected or not used. One such site was running Apache Tomcat Java Server, which I did not care to leave running. Now I, like many users of commercial hosting plans, pay for cPanel/WHM which includes a myriad of options/configurations/settings to do almost everything on the server. Back in 2007, I had used the cPanel Addon to install Tomcat.

I have a VPS which is host to many websites. Some of those sites are permitted ssh access for their admins. However I am the admin to several sites myself. Each site has a different username (login/password) for administration. Additionally I have changed the ssh port to a different number (instead of the default 22) to avoid some script/bot attacks. All of this makes for very inconvenient ssh usage and plenty of typing errors.