Our new VA Linux 2130 server arrived yesterday (ya gotta love that extra-bright blue LED!). This box is a colo for an existing client who is upgrading. I’ve decided my favorite servers are the VA Linux 1U and 2U servers for web servers and the Dell 2450 2U box with RAID 5 for database servers. I’d go with VA Linux for everything if they came out with something supporting RAID 5 and hot-swap drives in a 2U format like the Dell 2450 series.
I configured one of two new VA Linux FullOn 2200 series servers today. They’re fast. The thing that most impressed people wandering by, though, was the very, very bright light coming out of the blue LED on the front of the case. It was bright enough to project a blue circle of light on the wall opposite the server.
After reading others experiences with Helix Gnome, I decided to try it out for myself. It’s an easy install and the installer handles the download as well. It seeems like a vast improvement over the Gnome that ships with Red Hat. Among other things, the GUI is much faster and more responsive. I suspect this is because Red Hat uses Enlightenment and Helix uses Sawfish by default. Sawfish seems much faster and less bloated than Enlightenment in general – it does Window Manager stuff and leaves everything else to Gnome. Anyway, Helix is very cool. Recommended.
I also spent a few hours resolving yet another Verio DNS problem. One of our clients is also a Verio customer with DNS problems. In both cases, Verio does the secondary DNS. We’ve decided to do secondary for each other instead. It will be a bit of work to switch all our domains over to the new secondary servers but it will be worth it to be free of Verio’s incompetence.