Blog

Posted 2007/04/23

Skutter VM is born

The web parts of the VERA project will eventually be hosted on a Linux server called Skutter. Due to the way Universities and funding agency dish out money we wont be able to buy the actual server until after the project has started. To get round this I have used the Xen virtual hosting environment we have to run a ‘virtual Skutter’ until the real one arrives. Like our other servers Skutter is named after a Red Dwarf character but Joe Public will see it via its domain name which will be vera.rdg.ac.uk.

Xen allows us to run multiple operating systems on one big server, this is slower than running on its own hardware but will be fine as a stop gap measure. The OS is Debian Etch (the current stable version) and we are using the sane standard set of software such as Apache 2 and PHP 5.

You might have noticed that through the magic of time travel I am writing this post on the blog which hasn't actually been created yet.