Also, please excuse howlers caused by my inability to proof read my own punctuation. Sorry.

Tis ok. This should probably all be in 'Let me check my notes' but it seems appropriate here as this will be the last post before shutting down to move elsewhere.

The hosting of this site has a long and chequered history, mostly due to my trying to do it as cheaply as possible. It started off in a user account on a shared linux machine, rented out at 30quid a year. It got hacked into about three times, and the whole thing demolished, which led to downtime and me having to spend a lot of time reconstructing from various "back-ups", including (on one memorable occasion) the Google cache. After the third of these incidents, Nik kindly stepped in and offered - free of charge - disk space and bandwidth on a linux box sitting in his front room and running on his DSL connection, and there things ran happily for a while. But it was not to be forever, and (for various reasons) a new home was needed.

At this time, my good friend Andy informed me he had bought a dedicated server - cheap because it was on old hardware. At the time we thought that old would just mean slow, but the fact that it needs rebooting twice a week indicates that old means crap. We've been trying to get it sorted out, but Andy's been migrating to VPSes, and I was looking into it when Dan gave me the filip I needed to sort it out once and for all.

And with that, I shall begin the process of moving this to there. It should be working in an hour or so - but you may not see it for a couple of days because the DNS will have to propagate. I also won't be on hand over the weekend to sort out any problems because there's a fault on my broadband line and BT are coming round on Monday to look at (and hopefully fix) it.

Who knows if this works or not.

good luck - and thanks with all efforts, rab. I shall be migrating to south Holland this weekend, to clean the windows of a windmill and to spend some time with my lovely Dutchman, so I\\\'ll be back on Monday too :o)

Bani'shed?

Yay! I always forget about that little gotcha. And penelope - congratulations on being the first to see the new place - some people might not get in for a couple of days.

[rab] Thanks, as ever.
[pen] This Dutchman is starting to sound serious...

[Cdm] Yes, he is. Do you know any rib-cracking windmill-based jokes that might make him smile a bit more?

Why to windmills make the best shops? Because they've always got a sail on.

[pen] I hope you get a bunch of flours.

(pen) Don't know any windmill jokes but you could try call him clever clogs. Is he called Wim? One scours the place for names like that. ATB, BTW.

This place is still up and running.

A most wonderful migration, one can hardly see the join. Well done, rab!

[Darren, Projoy] Good efforts.
[Rosie] Nope, he's called Jan - equally typical. I think 'Clever Clogs' is a mainly British expression, innit? He actually brought me klompen the first time he visited. They're unfortunately too big, and might go on ebay next week!;o)

[rab] Thanks for a quick flit. I can see the new place from this part of .ac.uk now.

[rab] Hadn't even noticed the change! Guess that's good praise.

Wow. It's fewer network hops from my house to here than it is to my server. A lot fewer. Farther in terms of latency though, geography won't be completely ignored. And the fact that the route from my house to my server has to go through Los Angeles and San Francisco for what I'm sure are not very good reasons has a lot to do with it. [rab] Out of curiosity, what sort of ping times are you getting?

(pen) I suspect "clever clogs" is simply light-hearted British alliteration but the Dutch are so good at English he might even geddit. (rab) I'm with Tuj, q.v.

I'm finding the site a lot more responsive now.

[Projoy] There was a slow period this morning but that doesn't seem to have happened again since - suspect someone else on the machine was using the CPU time.

[Dan] Ping time from JANET is about 24ms, not sure if that's good or bad. It's a direct hop from JANET to the xtrahost network, but this seems to take place in London rather than Edinburgh... so there you go.

[rab] pssht. 24ms is less than the distance to my DSLAM from my router. (Which I really, really don't understand.) Good enough for pretty much anything. Though I imagine in the UK low latency is probably fairly normal.

[Dan] I am quoting the right figure: "64 bytes from rab.org.uk: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=24.1ms"? www.google.com comes in at about 21.6ms, and www.bbc.co.uk at 11.0ms by the same measure.

[rab] Yep. Pity you don't have local peering, but that looks more than good enough. You'll have to check from home as well, if that's where you do your maintenance. I'm really jealous. Xtrahost looks great. They even have an SLA, which a lot of consumer-level VPS providers don't.

Anyway, I'm more than persuaded that virtualization is the coming thing. The idea of a server being physically implemented on a corresponding hunk of hardware already seems a little quaint. The amount of versatility and control you get from decoupling those concepts and essentially commoditizing CPU and memory along with bandwidth and storage is almost inarguably compelling. MS is putting up a fight as they always do when a shift occurs that challenges their business model. It's amazing to me that they stay in business when every good thing that happens is a threat to them rather than an opportunity.

(Though it must be said that a 99.9% uptime service level agreement means they're allowed to be down for 8 hours a year, which some categories of business would consider unacceptable. Still, it's much better than you or I have managed lately.) (And god, how I love Google sometimes. I just typed "0.1 % in hours per year" into the search field and up it comes.)

[Dan] I like the fact you can do things like "Current local time in New Zealand" too.

Well, the last place was down for 8 hours a week so 8 hours a year should be at least a 12-fold improvement. I'm not getting too excited about these people yet - all my previous providers (bar Nik) had certain shortcomings. But I was very impressed with the quick set-up (within an hour of my funds hitting their account) and am comforted by the fact that it's not infeasible to pop round and speak to them in person if things go horribly wrong.

rab] Congratulations!

I was disappointed to read that SABRE (the global airline res. system) is to be taken off mainframes running TPF. They used to quote ridiculous donwtime costs (something like USD1m per minute), due to the fact that they handled up to 9000 transactions per second. They're porting the system to Compaq NonStop, of which I (currently) know nothing, but I'll be looking into it. A few thousand TPF apps and ops programmers could be re-training in a few year, methinks.

Hmm, PHP doesn't seem to have realised.

most of the rest of the system. Pah!

Dear technically minded denziens of the Morniverse:

I am having hard disk space problems. I'm aware that I should get rid of some crap, which I fully intend to do. However, I'd love to be able to see how much space each folder takes up, at a glance, so I know which programs are more space-hungry and therefore which I can stand to lose.

My question is this: is there such a program, freely available, that you know of that might let me do this? I'd be deeply grateful to anyone that might point me in the right direction.

Sincerely,

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wel- I mean, nights. (crossposted to MCiOS and Orange, apologies)

Last week my modem kept dropping out, so I phoned my ISP and, after I did a basic check of my kit, they arranged for BT to do a test. Then, over the weekend, the line sprang back into action, and has been working fine since. The BT engineer came in this morning, did all his tests, and said "your connection doesn't get any better than this" (it's a 480m round-trip to the exchange!). So I wonder what went wrong in the first place... probably the weather.

[rab] A twelve week year? I wish I had your job.

[IS,P rab] But it's a 32 day week.

And still only one Saturday and Sunday.

[IS,P!] Just checking you were listening, err.