I just completed migrating this site across to a Joyent accelerator. It was a smooth and seamless migration. All I had to do was check out the site from my subversion repository on the new server, dump the database on the old server and import the data into the database on the new server. Then update the DNS server entries on my domain name registry website. Enable PowerDNS on the new server, then disable PowerDNS on the old server. Wait a couple of minutes for the change to propagate and refresh the browser to see the site running on the new server. I verified this by adding a simple HTML page on the new server to view in my browser. All in all it took a couple of hours.

Apparently yesterday was the last day to purchase a Mixed Grill or Three Martini Lunch hosting special from TextDrive. If you missed out, then you really missed out on two excellent deals.

You snooze, you lose.

I really wish that I found this posting in the Joyent Forums earlier. It tells you how to set up email and web domain aliasing to your Joyent account.

I purchased a Mixed Grill bundle from TextDrive which included hosting, online storage for secure backups, and Joyent collaboration applications. To access your joyent applications you have to go to http://username.joyent.net, and your resulting email address would be username@username.joyent.net, which to me doesn’t look that great.

So I came across the above forum posting which shows you how to set up an alias for username.joyent.net, so that you can access your joyent applications from home.yourdomain.tld, and your emails will be username@yourdomain.tld.

If your hosting is with TextDrive, then all you need to do is submit a ticket requesting that they add an MX entry for smtp.joyent.net, and a CNAME entry for home.yourdomain.com that points to username.joyent.net.

You then have to go to your Joyent Customer Control Panel and click on the Domains tab. This allows you to add a web domain and an email domain. Your web domain will be home.yourdomain.com, and your email domain is yourdomain.com. You should also select the “this is the primary domain” option.

Finally, make sure that the email aliases set up for yourdomain.com in your TextDrive webmin match the usernames of the users in your Joyent account.

All this means I can finally make use of my massive Joyent quota, which is about 50 times bigger than my Gmail account!

The other advantage of using the Joyent account is that it has IMAP, which Gmail doesn’t have. So I can access my email not only from an ajax web application, but also from a desktop mail client. The settings for your IMAP client are:

imap server: imap.joyent.net
smtp server: smtp.joyent.net
username: yourname@yourdomain.joyent.net

The Mixed Grill specials at TextDrive apparently end on 15 January 2007. If you are looking for great hosting, service, generous quotas, and a friendly community, then I highly recommend TextDrive.

Today I migrated my site over to TextDrive. It was a simple migration, but I still need to fix up email. I guess I will just have to wait until the MX rules propagate across the network.

Anyway I should be thanking David Peterson for the hosting he has provided me for the past year. I’ve decided to have a go at podcasting, and I couldn’t chew up bandwidth that way on David’s box, which hosts a few critical sites. So I’ve moved to TextDrive to use up their bandwidth.

I came across this forum thread on how to add a subversion repository to your StrongSpace account. This means you are able to use StrongSpace as your subversion repository, instead of having to use up precious disk space in TextDrive. The following is a rehash of what was covered in that forum thread.

Start by creating a subversion repository locally.

$ svnadmin create ./repos

Then secure copy the repository to your StrongSpace account.

$ scp -r ./repos ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com:/home/ss_user/repos

From your local computer, you can access your subversion repository on StrongSpace using the svn+ssh URL schema. For example:

$ svn list svn+ssh://ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com/home/ss_user/repos

This little tip allows you to store your public ssh key on StrongSpace, which means you can use sftp and scp to access StrongSpace without having to type in your password each time.

From the command line, enter the following:

Generate your public and private key. You can accept the default settings, or enter a passphrase to secure your private key.

$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
$ chmod 400 ~/.ssh/id_dsa

SFTP to StrongSpace to create a .ssh directory.

$ sftp ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com
$ mkdir .ssh
$ exit

Secure copy your public key over to StrongSpace.

$ cat .ssh/id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys
$ scp ~/authorized_keys ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com:.ssh/authorized_keys

We now need to CHMOD the authorized_keys file on StrongSpace so that only the user has read/write privileges. Note that when we SFTP in the following, we should no longer need to type our password in.

$ sftp ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com
$ cd .ssh
$ chmod 600 authorized_keys
$ exit

If you want to add more keys to the authorized_keys file on StrongSpace, you’ll need to first copy it to your local computer, then concatenate the new public key to the file and copy it back to StrongSpace.

$ scp ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com:.ssh/authorized_keys ~/
$ cat .ssh/id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys
$ scp ~/authorized_keys ss_user@ss_user.strongspace.com:.ssh/authorized_keys

I now have a StrongSpace account that came with my Mixed Grill special from TextDrive. StrongSpace is a secure file repository that is accessible either through SFTP or StrongSpace’s web application.

You can also use rsync to sync with a folder on StrongSpace. If you use a Mac, then the rsync command would be:

rsync -rltvz /Users/user/BackUp user@strongspace.com:/home/user

You’ll need to change user with your respective local and remote accounts.