I made the switch over to the new server today. Did you notice? I hope you didn't.

On Will Byrd's recommendation, I bought dedicated server hosting at ServerBeach about a week ago. I settled for one of the cheapest options, paying $159/month for an Athlon 2600 server with two 80 GB EIDE drives and 1 GB of RAM, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. $159 is a lot of money, but on the plus side, I now have lots more disk space (old BinRock was perilously close to filling up its single 74 GB disk) and more bandwidth than I'll ever use (this server comes with 2000 GB/month, and BinRock usually uses about 30).

I called the new server valhalla. It seems fitting; it's the glorious, spacious place we go to when our battle in this world is over, but we pay a heavy price to get there.

I promptly began configuring the new machine, and after two or three days of work, I had it nearly ready. Then, thanks to a misplaced '/' character, I accidentally deleted the /etc directory on the server, which is where all of the configuration files — for the operating system and all installed programs — are stored. So that's a bad thing. It's kind of the equivalent of deleting the Windows registry. I tried heroically to salvage the situation, and was actually surprised at how well the machine ran with a big chunk of its brain missing. But in the end I had to admit defeat and open a trouble ticket to request that the hosting provider reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system (for a $30 fee).

When Will Byrd recommended ServerBeach to me, he mentioned that they have great customer service. I was pleased to discover that this is, in fact, true (though of course I would have been happier to never find out for sure). I opened the trouble ticket at 1:10 PM on Sunday, and worried that nothing would get done until Monday morning. However, 42 minutes later I received an email saying the server was reformatted and ready. I was impressed.

Fortunately, I had taken notes the first time around, so this time I was able to just run through the list and get things done much quicker. After seven or eight hours of work, the server was ready, and I made the switch.

Other than a few minor issues, the transition went pretty cleanly, and all seems to be running well now. Please let me know if you spot anything weird, but otherwise, I guess the excitement is over. Now I have to figure out something useful to do with the old server — with a 10k RPM SCSI hard drive and 1GB of RAM, it'd be a waste to let it gather dust next to the other two computers I have no use for. Since the new server is called valhalla, perhaps it'd be fitting to build a Beowulf cluster out of the old ones.