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Since the end of last month my Finnish accounts at the HUT and Helsinki University and their Computer Science department have expired.

For the meantime the files on those accounts will be still there, though my mail won’t be redirected. So contact me via my iki.fi account. iki.fi supply a great service. Lifetime redirection, so I doubt my email will ever change.

Anyway, my shell accounts in Finland were about 1000 times better than they were in my previous University Bath. I remember in Bath getting a 20megabyte quota on a stupid Sun machine. OMFG

Initially in Helsinki my quota was a soft 2G limit. By the end when I worked for the department it got quite rediculous. :)

It wasn’t just the space, the Internet speeds in Finland are stupidly fast. As I left the department they had Cat-6ed Gigabit ethernet and it could well be called Gigabit Internet. There wasn’t any pay-as-you-go limits with Finland either. I remember in Bath the IT staff begging us not to cause traffic. In Australia though, we’re in the dark ages with people having to pay for inbound data. Argh!! :(

The CS environment wasn’t Debian. It was a RedHat hybrid called CSL. Jani Jaakola was behind this and I must say he is easily the best Systems Administrator I’ve encountered. I had a stable desktop, that was far more bleeding edge than Debian stable at the time. Jani by himself did what Helsinki IT and Helsinki University of Technology(HUT) departments couldn’t. A decent linux desktop.

Another honourable mention is Pekka Niklander. Pekka is the best at what he does. I would regularly visit his office for help as well as a chat. He would be the one who answered my numerous emails to support. I have a lot to thank him for. It is such a pleasure not to worry too much about hardware and the environment and get down to research. Thanks again Pekka.

Damn, I am getting all emotional.

Today I am using Californian based Dreamhost for about 80% of my hosting requirements. I was recommended to them by Hixie and I thank him for it. I rely on Jamie’s London based DSL-hosted AmPC running unstable for some things still. At Dreamhost they’ve recently upgraded to Debian sarge, which is nowadays pretty current. They also do hourly, weekly and monthly backups which is super sweet and is on par with Helsinki’s setup. My online digital life comes to about 7G of 16G that my Dreamhost plan offers. 7G basically includes all my projects, mail and pictures. So I am fine for space and I never even get close to my 210G monthly bandwidth limit.

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