This weekend i suddenly found the determinism to start tackling something i have been wanting to do for a while: transition halfdans.net to Django.

This has several implications, first of, i want it to run as a separate user to ensure security. Hey, one persons paranoia is another persons security consience. I could run it on the http://dev.infonet.dk server, but that one is going away some time in the future since we are eliminating that server in favor of just having a simple router do the job. The http://laesehesten-randers.dk server will also be upgraded some time in the future, it runs very hot - usually crashes during backup - not a great place to crash!

So, the option i have is, e.g., to run another apache instance on an alternate port, this is certainly one way to go ... buuuut, i really think a thing like this is better done using a virtual server. And it gives me a nice chance to take a look at one of the many virtualization options availble for debian, to make a long story short i settled on user-mode-linux since that just seemed like a nice way to go - and didn't require any host kernel meddling - and truth betold i didn't take the time to research other options at all.

I will write up on my user-mode-linux experience later.

One thing that needed doing before halfdans.net can start to migrate to Django is to get Vertigo to support proxying request to another server, this is pretty simple using Apache but i, of course, wanted to automate the process such that it is easy to do again and again.

Vertigo used to use Apache 1.3, but that version does not have mod_proxy support on etch, so i needed to migrate Vertigo to Apache 2.0 (2.2 actually), so now we have release 0.6.4.1 which requires Apache 2.0 and supports proxy subdomains.

I also found another rather embarrassing bug in Vertigo which should definaetely make you upgrade if you are using Vertigo (i am pretty sure i am the only user at the moment).

Since the server halfdans.net is hosted on has a tendency to run hot and crash, the virtual server is not running at the moment, but when it is it will be available at http://test.halfdans.net/

That is all for now, hope you all remembered George the past saturday, i guess all things really must pass.