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Equality and Diversity more important than education?

Today I checked my pigeonhole to find a certificate in there to recognize that I had attended an afternoon sitting in a lecture theater being told about Equality and Diversity.  Great, but this thing is nicer than either of the degree certificates that I also received from the same institution, and I didn’t have to sit any exams for this one.

I sincerely hope that the quality of the certificates doesn’t represent the weight that is given to the qualification, oh and the fact that this “course” was a compulsory requirement as an employee makes it even more amusing, surely a simple tick on the staff record would have sufficed, rather than the expense of producing these for all staff when we’re being told to save £11M over the next 2 years!

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Goodbye dear friend

For a number of years (more than I can remember, but between 15 and 20) I’ve had my web hosting on a box in my office beside my desk on a machine called pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk.  We’ve had our ups and downs over the years, but she became so long in the tooth, and a security scan last week prompted me to do something about it finally.  Today I pulled the plug on her (literally), and have switched over to my new rented server in a different country.

No longer will I hear the rattling of the hard drive when someone looks through a lot of my photos or web crawlers start indexing my site, and it’s just a silent beige box waiting to be thrown out.

All that remains are all the blog posts that I moved over onto this new server, and a CNAME record that redirects all traffic to the new box.  Some links from pcbo will still work, but most will change – this is a new machine with different operating system and web server software, much more modern and up-to-date, which should be able to cope with security patches much better.

It’s really something I should have done years ago, but now it’s less of a worry that I could be an attack vector on the university network.

So long, old girl.  You were old and noisy, and the office is quieter now.

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Test post for facebook integration

So if this works, I should be able to post on my new blog site and it should get cross posted to Facebook.

Baby steps, but with the help of the Facebook Auto Publish plug-in for wordpress it might mean that I post to my blog a bit more often.

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New Server

So I finally bit the bullet and started renting a hosted server.  Yes, this is long overdue and I can finally turn off the extremely old machine in my office.  What prompted this you ask, well it could have had something to do with the latest security scan on that old machine.  The OS and software was so old that upgrading it was going to be an absolute nightmare, and I really wanted something else up and running before I took the old one down.

Anyhow, I’m renting a server (not a vps) from www.online.net in Amsterdam an Dedibox SC SATA 2016 for €8.99 a month + Tax, which is not too bad a price for a dedicated box with 4G of RAM, 1T of disk space and a dual core processor, oh yes, and 2.5Gb/s network connectivity.

Anyhow, the migration from the old version of wordpress was slow, but apparently painless – I still need to check that everything came over safely, but on the surface it looks to be ok.  Of course, the new server has a letsencrypt.org certificate so it’s all https too.

There’s also a new gallery, I’m trying out piwigo after installing and then deleting zenphoto, which had issues with downloading the original sized images, which was a shame as it seemed like quite a nice system.