swisspig.net 2.0 (Tuesday, October 21, 2008)

After a great deal of stress, I appear to have successfully transitioned from the old server to the new server. This will be my first post on the new server, so we will see if it sticks. I've got all sorts of exciting stuff that I should write about, with regard to the transition. Here are some highlights:

• I have abandoned JVDS in favor of Slicehost, which gives me four times the memory, and immediately technical support.
• I have decided to switch from Debian to Ubuntu Server 8.04, which means that I am now 100% on Ubuntu for all systems that I manage. I'm hoping that this will allow me to use the most up-to-date software, and still get security updates. One of the goals of this transition was to totally (or at least mostly) eliminate custom compiled packages. As of now, all of the servers that are open to the network are standard packages.
• I gave up on thttpd, and have switched over to lighttpd which lets me do HTTP and HTTPS from one server, and has proper support for PHP and FastCGI, instead of having to hack it together.
• I also used this as an opportunity to fix all of the ultra-crappy mistakes I made when learning PHP, and the site is now more or less portable.
• As nearly as I can tell, all of my other applications transitioned without incident.
• I had considered moving from Exim to PostFix for e-mail... but after a good deal of research, I realized that I'd done my homework right the first time, and that Exim is the way to go.

So everything is up, and we will see what happens. At least now I have a platform on which I can build, for the foreseeable future. There are still a number of updates that need to be made, but I think I've done all the damage I can do for one evening.

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