As a software developer, I work on top of abstraction layers. There are a number of black boxes I build on top of. Compilers and servers fall into this category. The less time I think about the mundane details of how the code I write gets run, the more time I can spend dealing with the higher level abstractions, like "what is this application supposed to do, exactly?" That level of ignorance is helpful at times, but ultimately not healthy to maintain absolutely. That's one reason why I've been steeping myself in the black arts of compiler construction. The other seedy underworld I have placed myself in recently is that of server administration.

I'll cop to this: I suck as a sysadmin. My first act, after putting myself in charge of my very own server (a VPS, actually) was to lock myself out of administrative access. Well, the best way to learn something is by taking it apart and sometimes you break things this way. When I was just a young thing, I would quickly grow tired of playing with toys. Phillips screw drivers were my favorite tool, they allowed me to take apart almost any electronic toy or piece of equipment. Sometimes I broke things. I loved electric motors, I would take them out of my toys, and wire them up to batteries for fun or slightly nefarious purposes. But mostly I turned perfectly good toys into piles of parts. Once I figured out that my desk lamp had quite a bit of electricity flowing through it. I learned this by taking out the bulb and poking my finger into the bare socket. I had seen someone causing water to separate into hydrogen and oxygen (O2) gas by applying electricity, so I placed to wires into a glass of water and connected the other two to the parts of the same lamp socket. This produced a terrific flash of light, and melted some of the wires into balls of molten copper.

Me having a server is like a ten year old boy having 110 volts of electricity at his disposal. I don't really have a lot of experience with server security and I might get a shock here or there, but I probably won't burn the house down. Since you are reading this very blog, I have managed to successfully migrate it to the new server, as well as my wife's blog and a private git repo. I've even made some improvements. Apache isn't even installed on my server. I'm running Nginx which is directly interacting with php running through a CGI interface. I'm using normal WP Cache for page caching and APC for PHP opcode caching and it seems to be pretty snappy. Now that I have a server playground to work with, I can experiment with other technologies, like CouchDB, MongoDB, Node.js, Django, Rails, the oddly-named Hunchentoot, and whatever else I'd like.

All in all, I've had fun with the new server, setting up file permissions, making sure only the services I want running are running, no extra open ports, and all that. Getting Nginx to do my bidding is a bit of a challenge, but worth it compared to the massive hulk that is Apache. All this is possible through extremely inexpensive Linux VPS services provided by ARP Networks. Apparently, these guys don't spend any money advertising, they just are awesome and get business through word of mouth. That's probably why they are so inexpensive. The introductory level VPS is only $10 a month, compared to $20 for Linode or Slicehost for similar service.