Reboot

It's been a while since I've done an update, but the blog was becoming overrun with spam and the server was continually rebooting. I've spent a good portion of the day completely reconfiguring the entire VPS. It was quite a learning experience, actually.

I backed up my SVN repository, config files for Apache and a few other zipped downloads. I then put a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 on the slice as I was running 8.04 before. It was nice to have a fresh set of binaries to play with, although anything crucial (i.e. Django) I tend to get from source.

I added a tight firewall and a script to start it on reboot (something which I'd forgotten to do before!), using this article. I also deployed all of my sites with Mod_WSGI as opposed to Mod_Python, which seems to have made things a bit faster. In addition I've now put memcached on the server and am slowly migrating the sites to use it.

The next tasks will be to install nginx, configure it as a reverse proxy and to serve static/media files as well as create a "proper" deployment procedure using pip, virtualenv and fabric. It would also be highly prudent of me to sort out a daily automatic backup system using Boto and Amazon S3.

I've turned off comments for the time being until I can write/utilise a good spam filter.

Now back to writing regular articles...!