So, I've changed jobs, I now work for the incredibly awesome Mythic Beasts, So far it's been great, we've hit a few problems, we've made sane plans, and we're moving forwards and making things easier to manage long term. I've mostly been involved with debugging mac-mini boot problems, and getting them working with (as far as possible) stock kernels, rather than our previous set of custom compiled kernels, so that it's easier to upgrade later, and so that we're not having to maintain a whole set of patches that we shouldn't need to! We're also starting to package our own software that we use internally so that actually deploying new servers is becoming a lot easier, and configuration of our previous packages is now (mostly) handled by debconf, meaning that actually setting up backups is becoming much easier.

We've also changed out main backup strategy from using a (slightly flaky) openvpn connection with loopback mounted ext3 filesystems to using rsync with the --fake-super option - the only thing that we've found slightly wrong with this so far is that --fake-super can't reconcile symlinks (it uses user level xattr to store the origional permissions, and with symlinks this doesn't work, because, apparently, symlinks should store user xattr attrbutes!).

We also offer ipv6 for all our dedicated and vps customers, as per the mythic blog - and our 2 authoritative name servers are both v6 enabled. We're working towards making all of our core services available over both ipv4 and ipv6, and we should be there soon.

It's fantastic to work for a company that has the technical knowledge and no-shit stance that Mythic Beasts has, we will hold our hands up if we do something wrong, and we'll tell you exactly what happened, why, and what we're doing to stop it from happening again.

So, 1 month in, and I'm absolutely loving working for them, and I've been a customer of theirs since black cat networks sold their domain name side to them, and shortly afterwards bluelinux sold their virtual servers service to them.

Our new VDS lite service is reasonably priced, and well spec'd. I thoroughly recommend our services, and obviously, we actually use our own vds service to provide some of our services - so it's as important to us that it keeps working as it is for our customers.

Wow, so that was a very salesy post. Erm, next time, back to whinging about authors not having written the books I'm waiting for yet! :)