Fedora Core 6

Given that I haven't said much about MacBooks or Fedora recently you would be forgiven for thinking that I'd given up on them. The reality is that the good ol' MacBook (yeah, coming on for 7 months old now) is doing splendidly and my 'Fedora Project' is well underway. The Fedora thing went off in an unexpected direction though:

The plan, after buying a copy of "Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache" was to install Fedora Core 4 on an old desktop PC so I could familiarise myself with it before switching my online web server over to it. However, we then decided to move house, had a barrel of laughs when a burst pipe in the loft soaked the place (on the day we moved in), and in the meantime observed that Fedora is currently up to Core 6 with Core 7 on the horizon. Then the folks I hire my server from came up with what must be the stupidest special offer in the history of dedicated server leasing: "hire one, get one free". I mean, whose going to be able to make sensible use of an offer like that? Well, me actually.

The lease on my old server was due for renewal so I renewed it for just a couple of months and took up the special offer (so I currently have three servers). What I've done is to put three of my 'play' sites on one server while my 'important' sites are going on the other. At the moment I'm just concentrating on getting everything moved over before the contract ends on the old server but when I'm done I'll be able to use the 'play' server to try things and learn the ins and outs of the OS with no fear of accidentally taking the 'important' sites off-line if I mess up.

The reason I haven't blogged about this to date is that I don't anticipate that it would be a whole lot of use to anybody. I didn't actually have to install Core 6 because the servers were supplied with it already installed. They were locked down such that the only way in was through SSH so I've had to go in, open other ports, start httpd, sendmail, mysqld etc. Not a lot of point me documenting that here (I've made notes for my own future reference) because unless you, dear reader, were to hire exactly the same type of server from the same company the chances are you'd be looking at a (slightly) different list of things to check off your to-do list in order to get up an running.

I will be blogging about some of my endeavours with Fedora as and when I anticipate that it may be interesting and/or useful for others. For example I bought four books (two about Fedora Core 6 and two about Webmin) whose usefullness I will no doubt comment upon at some point. In the meantime I'm just quietly getting on with it.