Perhaps this is a familiar refrain for some readers… but I’ll say it again: Linode rock! On their 7th birthday, they are giving current and new users a huuuge RAM upgrade —  around 42% on average. From humble beginnings as a Linode 64 five years ago, my Linode 512 is now a Linode 768. Yikes!

“Good news. Linode’s getting older.”
“… and Leon is getting laaaaarger!”

Already blessed with plenty of memory available for cache (which is very handy on a VM with relatively slow I/O), I now have even more headroom:

While the packages were downloading, I noticed a few coming from universe, but fewer than I had expected. I try not to use universe stuff on my mission-critical server, but some things are just too good to live without. Perhaps they’re candidates for main inclusion?

So, here’s some of the universe stuff I can’t live without on my server, excluding supporting libraries:

• collectd: Totally awesome “just works” system information collection and graphing tool. No more dicking around with nightmare configuration of Cacti and friends — collectd comes with a bunch of useful and sensible plugins that are ready-to-go for common graphing tasks. collectd has a vote of confidence from the Red Hat Emerging Technology folks, so you know it’s good.
• libapache2-redirtoservname: Convenience module for making sure you’re always redirecting to the primary domain name for your websites — with only one line in your VirtualHost configuration. Here’s how easy it is to use:

  ServerName bethesignal.org
  ServerAlias www.bethesignal.org perkypants.org www.perkypants.org
  RedirectToServerName On

• rtorrent: Simply the best terminal-based torrent client.
• php5-xcache: Opcode caching for PHP. Handy when running lots of PHP gash.
• mailgraph: Lets me know how much spam I’m killing, and email I’m suffering. See mailgraph on gnome.org for a great example of mailgraph in action.