Tero Pikala

Of course, lot of things happened in 4 months. Here’s highlights of my life:

• I moved from Greenwich/Deptford border to Rotherhithe. Not too far away but totally different place. I have first time in my life own outside door. This place is so quiet I can’t believe it; I think I haven’t live anywhere this quiet since I moved away from my parents house in -94.
• I went to Dublin for long weekend with Elina, Markku & Jani mid July.  We ended up drinking way too much (who would have guessed that!) but anyway it was nice to see my friends from Helsinki.
• Hanna & Wesku got married. Really cool wedding at Hotel Kamp and hopefully ok stag party. I went to Helsinki twice in September for them
• I left tmg. I really liked that company but I just refuse to work with 5+ servers making hellish noise less than 2 meters from my desk. But I miss having lunch at Borough Market so much already…
• And I started at Haymarket. I hate commuting all across London to Hammersmith but it seems like a nice place to work in. I’m little bit worried about how often people go for “couple of pints” after work though
• Now I’ve been in Haymarket for almost 2 months and things are “settling down” bit by bit.

Now it’s less than 4 week until I’m back in Helsinki again - and again for wedding!  This time I have no official role so I can enjoy party even more…

Tags: London by tero
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I moved to new home late June (that’s 4.5 months ago already).

Of course previous tenant had decided not to terminate his ADSL connection properly and I had to wait again about a month before I had connection.

Then in August I got tired of the fan noise from current server and decided to change it - and being careless managed to fry CPU or motherboard. I got replacement parts few weeks ago and now I’ve finally moved everything from old computer to new one.

I have now rather fast Intel Celeron D 3.2GHz with 2GB of memory - and there’s still room for additional 2GB. It has also total of 1.1TB hard disk space. That should be more than enough to run small home server
I know it’s nerdy but this time I decided it’s time to virtualize some services. I have now following virtual machines:

• SSL-VPN with SSLExplorer and SSH server. I’m using it to run Irssi in Screen
• Mail server. Procmail, Fetchmail, Dovecot, Spamassassin. One day I will setup Roundcube webmail here as well.
• Web server. Apache 2.2, PHP, ColdFusion 7, MySQL.

Still under construction is separate server for Micro$oft stuff - I’ll be using .NET in the future as well…

Most important reason for doing this is being able to backup virtual machines easily. If I ever decide to upgrade my computer I only need to backup virtual machines, reinstall base operating system and install VMware. I can also test new server software way easier this way.

Tags: London by tero
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