Don’t be afraid to break things nature of which you don’t yet understand. As my recent experience shows, the more you break – the more you learn.
Since I started using Linode, I’ve never actually dealt with the Linux much mostly running “apt-get install” or “apt-get upgrade” to make new things available in the environment, and occasionally changing .conf files to tune things up. As setups were getting more complicated (or so I thought by adding more and more to .conf files) a fear of all this being down one day and inability to restore it quickly grew on me.
I mean what if you have nginx/php/MySQL setup on your Linode and as a result of some system issue slice is no longer bootable? What do you do? Who do you run for help to? continue reading »