tea and tumbleweed were chatting one evening about having a shared dedicated server in london for #clug (or clug in general) members to use as MX, shell box, etc.

Basically Xen would be out of the question, because cheap boxes don’t have enough RAM, it would have to be shared. This would mean agreeing on a common MTA (HORRORS!), and sharing root between a group of people… :-)

Some options:

• VPS: Bytemark
• Cheap Dedicated: UK2
• Good Dedicated: Black Cat

tumbleweed has a “Value” server with uk2.net, who’s lease expires on 22 Feb. If 11 other people were interested, we could renew it, for the cost of about R600 pa, each. This would save on setup costs.

Anyone keen? We have a wiki page on the subject, add yourself.

I’ve been doing some themeing work on Clug Park, and it’s pretty much ready to go now. It could still do with some theming work, and probably some more blogs (I bet there are other blogging CLUGgers out there).

It seems that PlanetPlanet might switch to an entirely re-written version of it’s software. That shouldn’t be a problem, I think the themes are still compatible.

We’ve hacked our planet to always display 2 entries from every member. If we switch, the hack will have to be ported. Which isn’t a bad thing, I don’t want to pass the patch upstream if planetplanet is about to switch to another trunk, anyway :-)

I’m having fun with a uk2.net dedicated server.

A video-hosting site that I admin is currently hosted on a colo box with some very expensive bandwith. While the burstable bandwidth we can get on it is amazing, it’s staggeringly expensive, and we have a small quota. Thus we can’t sustain too much traffic.

For poorer customers, I want to look at some cheaper bandwidth… UK2.net are having a special where you can try a dedicated box for £0.99 for it’s first month. With 2TiB of traffic / month (2 orders of magnitude more than the co-lo box) it is more than up to the job, and upgrading to an un-metered 10M link is cheap.

So, I’m trying out the mid-range option. I get a GiB of RAM, 80GB HDD, and more bandwidth than I know what to do with. A bittorent :-) test shows that it’s reasonably well connected.

Now to set up a demo website and see how it compares to our current uber-expensive box.