I've been without Internet at home for the last week. Internet access on my primary computer, that is. Which has really thrown me behind. I've got 167 blog entries to read from you guys that have blogs that I follow, not counting all the tech and tattoo blogs. And maybe some tumblr porn too.

It may take me some time to catch up....

And it might be interesting to anyone who's geeky enough to understand it.

Sometime ago, I had purchased a Pogoplug. It's basically a network device that lets you plug in USB drives and access them from any computer.

It's a great idea, but the Pogoplug implementation of it is extremely poor. Extremely.

All access to any drives plugged into it goes through their servers, even when I just wanted to access files locally on my LAN.

Which makes it so fraking SLOW!

Which is not what I wanted. But that's what I get for buying it and not a real NAS in the first place.

So I started looking for OS replacement alternatives for the Pogoplug. And I found one!

I followed the instructions here and installed a flavor of linux on the Pogoplug.

And then I installed samba.

The only problem I noticed with it was that the LED on the front of it continually blinked. Which I fixed by editing /etc/rc.local. Because the model I have is slightly different that what the main install distro has (currently), I had to use use this path instead: /usr/local/cloudengines/bin/.

A little more info.

And since I'm a n00b at *nix, and I don't really know samba at all, I had to reference help here and here.

And now everything is up and running fine. And FAST! And I can now see my porn from any computing device in the house.

Back in October, I discovered my current web host was going out of business. I asked for recommendations, which many of you offered. Based on J.P.'s recommendation, I ended up choosing MacHighway. While I'm not a Mac guy in any way, I do like the fact that the servers are wind powered.

I first moved a couple of my "static" business websites over to them to see how that went. After not seeing any real issues, I decided I'd take the big leap and move this site over to them as well.

Which was a little more challenging.

MacHighway has excellent documentation on moving from one host to another, and all the things you need to do to make it work. I ended up having issues with both methods they document for moving WordPress sites, so I ended up doing it my own way. Which worked.

As I write this post, I see a few minor things I need to figure out what's going on with. But for the most part everything looks like it survived the move.

Seriously, how cool is that lightshow? If I ever get fabulously wealthy, I'm doing that level of decorating. Luckily we don't have any neighbors!

You should head over to YouTube and check out the rest of his videos. Holy cow!

Totally found from a link posted by Thomas of My New Life.

bitServe has ceased operations. Paid subscribers will be provided hosting service through December 31, 2011 in lieu of a refund.

I don't know when they posted this, but I was taken by surprise, especially considering I don't recall receiving any email about that from them.

Which means my hunt begins for a new web host which to move all the domains I own over to, including my blog. /joy

It's been a long time since I had to go hunting for a web host.

My basic requirements are PHP 5 support, Perl support, MySQL database support, FTP and telnet access, and some sort of admin control panel.

Do any of my readers have any recommendations? Who do you use, or who do you know that I should avoid?