It’s been over a year since Gaslamp Games moved from the seedy underbelly if shared hosting into the semi-professional world of a virtual private server.
How did I celebrate this great day you may ask? I broke the server…twice.

Currently Gaslamp Games is hosted on a virtual private server or VPS.  A virtual private server has some huge benefits over our old shared hosting:

• Users/Groups – No longer is every single file owned by the same person. Different users can be allowed access to different services at my will.
• SSH – Can anyone say 4096bit secured communications?
• Digital Certificates – In short we can now prove who we are when you access secure areas of the server (https://)
• Proxy – Everyone needs a proxy in the US
• Hardware – The server we are running is running within another server so we don’t have to worry about hardware maintenance.
• Software freedom – We can run any service we want on the machine without any hassle what so ever
• “Physical” terminal – Access like you were right at the server in person.. but from anywhere on the internet. More on this later…

Until a couple of weeks ago we were running Ubuntu Server 9.04.  Sure I kept up with all the security patches and no software was at risk but there were some really cool file system enhancements I wanted to get with the later versions of Ubuntu.  So at the early hours of 3:45AM when every one was done using the servers I began the scary process of taking down our machine and updating. I couldn’t go directly to 10.04 but instead had to go from 9.04 to 9.10 then 10.04LST.  And at each upgrade I had a mini heart attack when things didn’t work.  Luckily our host Linode had great support to cover us.  I must say that they have been great as far as up time and have a strong community to ask questions about.

Heart attack #1: 9.04 -> 9.10

Kept on booting into recovery mode.  Google searches proved nothing useful but Linode shines through again.  All I needed to do was change the kernel in a drop down menu.

Heart attack #2: 9.10 -> 10.04

Cannot find root device!  This one took a lot longer to figure out.  You know that new file system I was excited about? Well I forgot to add an entry in my /etc/fstab to and the system was expecting it. Linode has a recovery mode you can boot into to make actual changes to your file system without having to mount the partition at startup.  In addition they have a shell called List which functions like a hard wired console, just in case you break SSH doing something you weren’t suppose to.  With these two tools and a great howto to fix this problem I survived a double upgrade in less than two hours!