Dedicated server from ServerMatrix

I ordered a dedicated server from ServerMatrix this afternoon at 12:30pm. At 7:50pm they notified me that my server was online, configured, and ready to go. That is what I call service!

RedHat 9’s up2date software works pretty well, although the names of some of the packages could be improved. For instance, g++ is in the gcc-c++ package. Installing Java 1.4.2 was trivial, especially since the machine downloads off Sun’s site at 1 megabyte per second, the fastest I have ever seen over the net. If you haven’t built tomcat recently, I have to say it is the slickest install that I have seen:

1. Download the build.xml
2. ant -Dbase.path=… checkout build

And you’re done. Built from source. Really a cool idea that I think would be nice if other projects migrated to. The hardest part of the whole thing was getting one of my custom libraries for Neverwinter Nights to compile. Apparently on this install of RedHat 9 I have to explicitly link with zlib and I didn’t on the old machine. MVP of the whole operation is rsync. No easier way to duplicate a configuration somewhere else.