On Friday, Sabrienix ordered another machine to add to our network and a little while later Xatu was born. I’ve been wrestling with it ever since, trying to get FreeBSD to play nice (it’s not supported by the datacenter, so I’m on my own in installing it, see previous tweet) in an optimal way because the pipe he lives on is quite large so I want him to be able to serve a large number of clients without breaking a sweat.
I stayed up until 6am this morning after waking up at about 9am, and I finally got it to behave. I’m doing the final installation and configuration of things like PHP and whatnot, and I’m starting to flesh out the beginnings of our new automation system. We’d experimented with cPanel for automation, but I really don’t like it.
Basically, cPanel only really works well under Linux, and you simply have to do things it’s way. I’m not really comfortable with that because I have vastly more experience with FreeBSD and I have a certain way I like things set up. Add this to the fact that there’s literally thousands of cPanel/WHM hosting resellers out there and I see little reason for Sabrienix to jump into that crowded pool and potentially lower our standards.
So long story short, I finally got this machine de-penguinated and it seems to be running pretty well. When everything’s configured the way I want it I’m going to hit it with ab to ensure it’s rock-solid before I start loading clients onto it, but I’m confident it should be a performance boost from our other servers so I may move clients who want a little more “zap” to their website to it. All total I got about 4 hours of sleep last night before jumping out of bed to get right back to it, but after the weekend’s over Sabrienix should be set to host just about anything.
Right now though I have to go to the store to get dog supplies – we’ve been out of puppy pellets since yesterday, and the dogs have no rawhide or anything to keep them busy so they keep bugging me while I try to work. 
Tags: sabrienix