GNU/Linux

Quote of myself from four years ago:

I had to do the migration to a parallel machine and had only one week to accomplish this. I’ll never do it this way again, however, rather pay for two servers for a short time and decide when to finally switch.

This is exactly how I did it this time.

Although Debian 5 lenny had been released in Feb 2009, it didn’t yet make it into Host Europe’s 4.0 line of virtual servers; instead, that virtual machine was still based on 2007’s Debian 4 etch, which received its last kernel update, still 2.6.18, by the provider in Aug 2011. I upgraded it to Debian 6 squeeze nonetheless. I noticed that this year’s Debian 7 wheezy does not run under an etch kernel (especially libc6, rkhunter and aide), and as squeeze is already oldstable since May and will no longer be maintained by next May, it was time to perform an upgrade.

Now I run an instance of their 7.0 line with the same price, but RAM and disk space were both doubled (to 2 GB and 100 GB, respectively). It is still based on squeeze with a 2.6.32 kernel; based on my experience, I expect it to run wheezy and jessie before I have to switch again (in about another four years).

Like previously (and like seven years ago), I did the TCP forwarding using rinetd, except for Postfix, for which I set up relaying again.