GameDevMike

I recently decided to sign up for an unmanaged virtual private server. The primary reason is that, in the near future, I’m going to need a fixed ip, a good pipe, and a box that is constantly up and online in order to do some testing. I’m not prepared to fork out for a dedicated server just yet, so a VPS seems a good solution for now. Since I’ve got it, I’ll be using it for other things as well, such as for a subversion repository of both open and closed projects. I’m toying with the idea of moving one of my web site domains over to it. I’m still maintaining one for my old DAOC guild, but it’s not seeing much usage these days. We hope to revive it when Warhammer Online is released, but even then I don’t expect it to eat much bandwidth. Since I’m paying for the space, and have quite a bit, I might as well cut what I’m paying for the current host from my annual budget (which isn’t a whole lot, but it still frees the money up for something else).

I’m still a long way from being a Linux guru, but I chose CentOS from a wide selection of distros offered. Getting subversion set up was the easy part, since I’m using svnserve. At some point, I’ll need to switch over to going through Apache, methinks, since I’d like to get Trac set up. That’s all too much to bother with right now, though, particularly since I’m not serving any web pages just yet. So svnserve suits me fine for the moment.

Over the past few hours I’ve been fuddling my way through seeing what’s installed already, installing the things I need that aren’t yet, mucking with config files, and whatnot. I’ve had my Safari bookshelf open with a couple of books to help me out, such as Learning the Vi Editor, which has really helped me get more up to speed with vim. I’ve also got a handy copy of Hardening Linux that I picked up a while back for just such an occasion. I’m still working out which bits are relevant to my situation, but it’s been enlightening so far. And of course, the Linux Command Directory is proving to be a useful resource.

I don’t boot into my Ubuntu partition near as often as I originally intended. When I do, I tend to always work through Gnome interfaces rather than in the terminal. So working with command line tools through SSH is good experience for me. I’m surprised at how much I still remember from the times I’ve toyed with Linux in the past. I’m not the noob I used to be. Still, there’s a ways to go yet. Maybe in a few more months I’ll be much more well-versed in Penguinese.;