I have decided to un-virtualise my development Gentoo/Linux machine.

I virtualised it so that it would be on more often, but that hasn’t transpired. In-fact it is on less often than it was before . Not only does my VMWare machine create a lot of heat it also takes ages to start up and then start the other VMs before performance equalises, consequently I run my development machine less  .

So I’m taking the opportunity to put the machine on to quieter hardware (I hope it’s quieter), to give it a second IP address (just aliasing eth0) and fully opening that up to the outside world and using iptables to protect it.

I am planning on making rsync between the development machine and my Bytemark VMs easier – to enable easier production deployment of any ebuilds I create and to allow me to keep monthly/yearly backups of my VMs should I need to.

I also want to make it a sub-domain of philipnet.com; with a webmail interface it can handle locally deliver emails to dev.philipnet.com and pass emails to philipnet.com to my main mail server.