i share a box with my friend andy where we host our own cvs, mail, database, web, dns, etc... just nice to have your own box for those things sometimes.
emphasis on sometimes.
after getting back from grabbing some xmas loot, i arrived back home to discover no mail. no web. in fact, no server. andy calls me a few minutes later and delivers the bad news: the box is dead, he's bringing it and a new machine over and we're going to set up a new system.
the hardware in the old box was 7 years old and had done its duties well. but finally something on the mobo just went *plonk* and that was that. fortunately, as we were to find out, the disks were fine. whew!
we installed the latest kubuntu on it and set to work migrating things over. i removed the disk pack from the old machine and plugged it into the new kubuntu box. on boot it recognized and set up all the software raid volumes and all we had to do was mount it and start copying data over to the new larger, faster storage. it's nice when things "just work" like that.
unfortunately it wasn't quite as easy as "copy 'n go" because the old box was fedora core 2. yes.. 2. we don't upgrade very often; primarily when hardware fails. i love linux =) so i migrated a number of old-style configs over (e.g. the monolithic httpd.conf to the new slice 'n diced style); chroot'd to the old disks, started postgres, dumped the db's and loaded them into the newer pgsql 8; had to set up more than i should've had to to get postfix+sasl running; etc, etc... 2 pizzas and half a dozen hours later everything is back up and running.
what a way to spend an afternoon.
it was also my first chance to really use adept. it is pretty cool, btw ... there are things that could be nicer (e.g. the sources editor is a bit lo-tek), but for a first stable release it's quite nice and very fast. great job, mornfall! can't wait to see v2.
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6 comments:
Separate your stuff out into Virtual Machines with Xen, or with VMware. VMware has some nice graphical tools, but to run it as a server you need GSX - which is a tad more expensive. Xen's not too bad to set up though.
What this means is that on a reasonable server with a reasonable amount of RAM you can separate out all your functionality into different logical servers without having anything running (or very, very little) on the base OS. You can simply back up your VMs rather than lots of individual files and directories, and if your server blows up all you do is get your new server, networking and Xen up and running, reload your VMs, start them and voila - reduced downtime utopia.
Separate your stuff out into Virtual Machines with Xen
My guess it was Kubuntu more for political reasons than practical. Virtualization probably wasn't even a part of the vocabulary.
On the other hand, "apt-get -upgrade" in the console sure beats many other methods of updating one's system.
@DanieL: we went with kubuntu because andy is really groovin' on it these days ("a debian that i can actually use without being annoyed!") and i am using it (and SUSE) around here as well ...
it was the intersection of our preferences.
Speaking of "copy 'n go" and "old-style configs" in moving to newer version of software: What’s the situation with KDE? Can I copy my .kde directory from e.g. KDE 3.1 to KDE 3.5 (and later to KDE4.x), and expect everything to work (my desktop settings, mail filters in Kmail, bookmarks, Kwallet etc), or is the config style in .kde also changing over time?
Janus
@Janus:
the config file format has not changed since KDE 1. the locations changed with KDE 2, but that means we have had something like 5 or 6 years of stability there.
we also have a mechanism that updates config files when the values in them change, so that upgrades can go smoothly.
that said, sometimes we screw up. we don't do nearly enough testing between versions and so every so often something slips up. usually things go well though =)
My guess it was Kubuntu more for political reasons than practical. Virtualization probably wasn't even a part of the vocabulary.
Kubuntu has little to do with it......
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