After a week of preparation, iamPariah.com and several of my other domain properties moved to my very own server this past weekend. No more virtual servers or worrying about whether some other guy’s Website is going to take down mine. Nope. Now I get all the CPU time, all the RAM, as much harddrive space as I need, and my own DNS servers. With that, I also get the slightly frightening power and responsibility to be my own sys admin; it’s up to me to monitor the health of the server, manage backups (I’m a fanatical backer-upper), and restart the machine and its laundry list of services and processes.
I have used and managed my own virtual servers continuously since late-1994 when I launched my first Website. I understand FTP and all that entails; I can configure cron jobs; I can setup my mailboxes, autoresponders, stats reporting, and write my own .htaccess rules. All the typical tasks involved with managing Websites in a virtual or shared hosting environment, I can do with ease. But now… Now I’m still configuring and managing all those options and services, but I’m also managing the server—the entire machine—on which my domains live. There are tenfold the number of things I must now understand, setup, monitor, and modify.
For several years I owned a mid-sized Web hosting company. One would think this makes me an expert sys admin. Nope. I was the CEO and had the systems operational knowledge of, at best, a level 3 tech support agent. The company had sys admins that did the server work. I just made sure they had machines on which to do that work and customers for whom to do it.
This is uncharted territory for me—and I’m excited to be learning.
I’m not running the server at my offices, of course; it’s sitting in a server farm at a hosting provider, enjoying triple-redundancy power backup systems and a very large pipe that sits only about a mile from a major backbone hub. I manage it remotely, through HTTP, FTP, and SSH (which I don’t yet fully understand).
Following advice I received long ago, I have created another user account to make modifications to the system. This makes the Root user account a backdoor of sorts, enabling me a way to correct errors I may make in the other account.
What else should I be wary of? Any sagacious tips or advice you experienced sys admins would like to share with this humble neophyte sys admin?
Gordon Woolf
I’m partway there, having shifted from shared hosting to a combination of that with a virtual server, but the final step scares me.
One problem is that there is little published on this aspect of the Internet. What I’ve learned is as a result of the tech people who have helped me and who I’ve badgered to tell me what they’ve done after solving a problem.
There is plenty on Linux/Unix servers etc but there seems to be nothing which is a guide to what you have done and what I hope to do shortly.
How about writing the much needed guide?