Technology Programming, Network Administration, Electrical Engineering, etc.

This will be the first article in my series on network administration and programming. Prior to this I have mainly written on the subjects of management and sociology. Technical walkthroughs and tutorials require a different kind of writing as they deliver very specialized, somewhat transient content. In the near future we should add categories to this blog so as to not mix up the content too much.

After repeatedly going through the process of configuring various linux servers on cloud based machines with scarce resources, I decided that it would be of value to document this procedure in an article like this.

Specifically I want to focus on configuring an OpenVZ based VPS to host a blog or even a corporate website using a CMS such as Norn, the CMS for VPS.

There is a number of companies out there, big and small, that offer OpenVZ or KVM based virtual cloud servers, sometimes at impossible to resist prices. Consider a 2 CPU, 128MB setup for $6 a year(!). I suspect the hosting companies cannot raise their prices because the cheap specials cannot usually guarantee steady I/O resulting in your server CPUs spending lots of time waiting for the disk, sometimes totally freezing up. The good news is that we don't have to depend on disk I/O. Even with the measly 128MB of RAM, we can cache everything that matters, and hardly ever need to access the disk.

The articles in this series are written alongside an actual system as it’s being built. Every command is pasted from the terminal after...

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