I gave up on running my blog on a VPS. It was just too problematic and I got tired of trying to get it working well. So I opted to put the blog on my old basement server.
My old basement server was a Dell PII 450 MHz machine with 256 MB of RAM. It was a good example of how Linux can extend the life of your hardware. It works well as a Internet gateway and mail relay but for serving dynamic web page pages it was a little slow.
When I purchased my XPS 700 monster I shelved the old PC. That one was a P4 3.2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. For running Linux it’s great.
At first I was bent on getting a fresh install but I ended removing the old hard drive and putting it into the new server. The worst that I had to deal with is the network interfaces were named wrong (one was coming up eth2).
After a little searching I found the file
/etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules
and fixed the names from
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2″
to
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0”
The udevd daemon is great but I hardly ever looked at it.
Page generation on WordPress went from 1.7 seconds on the old server to 0.234 seconds on the new one. That’s not too bad an improvement and all it cost me was a server that I was using as a door stop.