And We’re Back!

During my lunch hour today I rebuilt the VM that hosts pnotepad.org and untidy.net. It had been very unreliable over the last few weeks/months and it finally got to the point where it was easier to take the hit and rebuild rather than continuing to nurse it back to life.

Fortunately a good backup plan and the offloading of mail services to Google Apps last year meant that this was relatively painless. It was made even easier by the excellent facilities provided by my virtual machine host Bytemark. They made it a matter of a simple menu selection to have my VM rebuilt with a debian base image, LAMP stack ready to go. Recommended.

As far as I can tell all of the sites are up and working, the one thing remaining for me to check is that mail is still functional. I’ll get to that this evening.

I now need to keep an eye on load and stability with the new install and check that everything is as it should be. This time I made a point of creating a local VM for use when testing configuration changes and web site changes so keeping the server working properly should be easier.