Helvensteijn.com

I spent the last few hours copying everything from the old server to my new virtual machine. And a few minutes ago, I updated the DNS entry for the helvensteijn.com domain. It’ll take some time for the change to propagate across the internet, but soon, everybody should have this web site served by my new server.
If you see this post, that means that your DNS is up to date and you got this page from the new server.

Just two days ago, I received my new iMac. And this night, my new virtual machine went online. It will be running this web site in the near not-too-distant future.

Right now, this site sits quite comfortably on a shared hosting account. However, shared hosting has its limits, and with a virtual machine (a so-called Virtual Private Server), I have root access so I can do with it whatever I want. And it comes with its own IP address, so I can finally set up secure (HTTPS) access to my web site with the certificate I already own.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks setting everything up to replace my existing hosting account. Apache, PHP and MySQL are all running but still need to be configured properly. Then, I will also need a mail and DNS server, neither of which I have experience with. So I’ll have to look into that as well.

My current hosting account won’t expire before April 2009, so I’m confident that I have everything set up by then. Somewhere between now and then, this web site will move to the new server.

The specs of the VM are more than enough to even run Windows XP smoothly. For a server however, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me. So just like my home server, it runs Debian Etch.

Today, I received my new 24" Apple iMac. I opted for the 2.8 GHz model, with 2 GiB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive. The full specs can be found here. Oh, and I chose the Bluetooth keyboard, because I already have the corded version. As usual, here’s a picture of the beauty:

Apple iMac

Right upon arrival, I replaced the memory (I already bought two strips of 2 GiB prior to ordering the iMac itself), so it now has a spacious 4 GiB available. After the first boot, I installed all available updates and my most used applications. I’m now in the process of making all the settings and customizations that were not synced through my MobileMe account, and Time Machine is making its initial backup. When that’s complete, I’ll proceed with installing all other apps that now run on my MacBook.

When all that is done, and I have my iMac pretty much as my MacBook is now, I’ll probably reformat the latter and give it a fresh OS X install. At which point it can finally be what it was meant to be from the start: a portable secondary computer.