Stephan Paukner :: syslog

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.

Almost three years ago I migrated to a virtual server at HostEurope.de. It was a real relief to not care for any hardware anymore, and I’m really satisfied with their service which includes monitoring and restoreable snapshots. The only major problem I had was when I once tried to upgrade the C-library on an incompatible kernel version—I learned to use Debian Stable on servers. Minor problems however arose once in a while when I hit the privvmpages (private memory) limit. As only 256 MB RAM were guaranteed for my package in their 2.0 line at €15/month, I upgraded to the 512 MB package for €20/month a few months ago, which was a smooth single-click task. As they now already introduced their 4.0 line, I upgraded to 1024 MB for only €13/month. But 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. And as the monthly fee has now decreased, I had to pay €10 for this “downgrade” anyway.

I had planned to simply sync /etc, /usr, /var and /home to the new system to have a nonetheless smooth migration. But the new system turned out to be on 64-bit. So it took me more time to do a migration by hand, although I had asked their service in advance if that were possible. A further drawback was that I couldn’t keep the system’s RRD-files, as they seem to be platform-specific as well; that meant that all system log counters were starting freshly, as I was too lazy to export/import their data.

A WTF-situation arose when I noticed that the system had various server packages installed but was missing their symlinks in /etc/rc*.d and cron tabs in /etc/cron.*. I had to compare those with my old system.

phpMyAdmin wasn’t working anymore as it suddenly needed a localhost directive for MySQL in the config. That took me some time to find out.

Finally, ajaxterm didn’t launch in --daemon mode. That took me some time as well. As a quick hack I now start it without --daemon but with /usr/bin/nohup to the background.

I also had to take care that /etc/hosts is now dynamically created/overwritten at boot time. In my /etc/init.d/hostname_vps I now copy it from /etc/my.hosts.

For TCP forwarding I used rinetd and set up Postfix relaying like previously.

An interesting detail is that I moved from a 2×1500 MHz machine to one with 16×141 MHz.