Late Wednesday afternoon, I was assailed by a Mystery Illness; shivering and shaking, bundled in a shirt, sweater and jacket, I could not get warm. Considering the palpable waves of heat emanating from my body, I concluded that I had a fever. The odd thing was that, besides a major headache, I had no other symptoms - not counting that cobwebby, cotton-headed feeling one gets with fever. I can't ever remember having a fever without accompanying irritants such as coughing, runny nose, joint pain, flu, etc.

I'm not a hypochondriac in that I don't imagine that I'm frequently ill nor do I hallucinate the symptoms of the latest ailment to hit Dateline or the newest Epidemic For The Modern Ages on talk shows. In fact, I generally deny sickness and the need for a physician even in the face of indisputable evidence, such as blood gushing from a non-OEM orifice. However, I do have this tendency to assume that whatever is wrong with me is the absolute worst possible thing imaginable. Two migraines within a six-month span and I'm certain it's a brain tumor; anything but the most minuscule insect bite is doubtless the onset of necrotic flesh-eating bacteria. This Mystery Fever, however, is not so terrible as I might have supposed. After considerable research, by which I mean Googling, I have diagnosed myself as suffering from Dengue Fever. Don't worry; I'll probably be fine since it's only fatal about 20% of the time (source: WHO).

Prior to illness so rudely interrupting my blogging, I was going to answer a question from Afton, who is wildly curious about what Linux activities Alan is getting up to, though she attributes the curiosity to her husband Ray. ☺ I couldn't answer the question myself because my understanding of Linux is basically this: cute little penguin, kernels, kexec, clusters and wait, can we go back to the cute penguin. I asked Alan to do a Guest Geek Post, which you'd THINK he'd indulge me, seeing as how I'm languishing with Dengue Fever, but I had to ask 2 or 3 times.

Anyway, I finally have an answer! Alan on his new ventures in Linux:

I will be working for a web hosting company that specializes in dedicated servers and virtual private servers running CentOS Linux. The hosting control panel and the virtual servers are products of SW Soft, specifically HSPcomplete for the control panel and billing, and Virtuozzo for the control of the virtual servers. Virtuozzo is the commercial port of OpenVZ.

Before I applied at my new job, I set up a Linux box running CentOS and OpenVZ, working from this tutorial. I also made use of the OpenVZ wiki. While I understood what a virtual server was in theory, I had never used one or set one up. Now I have several running on one of the servers under my desk. It's an interesting concept and a cool technology.

Hmmm...he left out the bit about the penguins.