Ping

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something here, so it’s time to write some update.

A lot has happened (and still is going on) but regarding this site: You are reading this from my new server!

The old server was a fine machine that ran stable for years (thanks to FreeBSD). On the other hand, hardware does not get any younger and tends to wear out over time.

Also – as that machine had such a long path a lot of (wrong?) choices piled up:

• Switching from manually compiled world, kernel & ports to precompiled ones was leaving a huge trail of non needed dependencies behind.
• Being stuck on ezjail – it is still a fine project and does it’s job, but it seems this project has been abandoned for a long time now.
• Not planning ahead for having a separate partition for generic data was a crucial mistake. ZFS datasets do ease out the pain, but having just one for the base system, and another one for the jails does not provide much freedom. As a result a weird mixture appears storing that data alongside the jails (or worse inside them) – which leaves you with ugly and very confusing setup & configuration.

So after some toying around how to setup some native (thick) jails on a clean base system using a small box at home, everything I needed to know was there.

Only thing left was hitting the “buy now” button for the new server. Now I have twice the CPU count, RAM amount has doubled and the new disks are huge. All for roughly the same price as for the old machine.

I’ve estimated it will take me approximately three months to migrate everything between those servers. In the beginning this assumption seemed to be correct, as I was struggling to bootstrap a clean FreeBSD installation (the hosting provider does not offer images for it anymore). But at last I figured out some way how to bootstrap a clean installation.

After that things became very easy – as I already had working configuration for the old machine, the only thing left was to move them over, adjust to new addresses, and stripping out all that cruft mentioned above. Databases and static files were copied over via ssh. Easy as cake.

Roughly five weeks later everything was set, everything worked, so I was ready to hit the “cancel” button for the old server. I was a little bit sad when I did it, as it was such a great machine. But well, the new one seems to be even better! Still amazed how blazing fast that new machine is. So a very good choice in the end.

So long!