Nmap down time - fixed!

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Hi folks.  I'm sorry about all the recent down time.  I decided to
spend a few days camping in the Nevada desert (at Burning Man) away
from computers/phones.  As luck would have it, there was a major hard
drive failure just as soon as I left civilization!  So I returned on
Sunday morning to find everything down!  I was able to recover all of
the essential data (as far as I can tell so far), replaced the drives,
and installed and configured a new OS.  Everything _should_ be working
now, but let me know if you find any problems.  Here is the good news:

o We have a lot more disk space.  I replaced the two Western Digital
  Raptor drives (one 75GB, one 150GB) with two WD Velociraptors at
  300GB each.  So storage has nearly tripled, and these disks are much
  faster too.

o The system was previously running an obsolete OS: Fedora Core 5
  x86_64 with a bunch of my custom-compiled security patches and
  upgrades.  It was stuck there since I didn't want to suffer the
  downtime of a big OS upgrade.  But since we had that down time
  anyway, I upgraded to CentOS 5.3 x86_64.  That lets us run a lot of
  newer software, and it should be supported for many years to come.

While these are nice side benefits, it sucks to suffer this sort of
disruption at all.  This particular server does a lot, and is a single
point of failure.  One which requires physical presence to fix.  So I
am thinking of moving the most critical services (DNS, mail, svn, web)
to VPS or specialized-hosting services "in the cloud".  A good
provider should be able to provide more reliability by having
technicians on call 24/7.

So if anyone here wants to recommend a good hosting provider, let me
know.  I'll probably mostly use Linux VPS machines, though I'm open to
specialized web/mail/DNS/mailing list/svn/wiki/forum hosters if you
know good ones.  Just send me an email with your
recommendations/ideas.  I have a Dreamhost account, but they are less
reliable than me, even taking into account my desert escapades :).  I
need stable (not tiny) providers who value reliability and especially
won't shut us down without warning due to some silly complaint (like
GoDaddy has) or because we exceeded some unwritten resource limit
(like Dreamhost has).  Slicehost.com is the sort of VPS provider I
have in mind, but I haven't evaluated all the options to figure out
which one offers all the features we need with the best
performance/bandwidth/reliability per monthly dollar.

I hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend!

Cheers,
Fyodor


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