I am finally migrating my server. The hardware is about the same: Supermicro Detroit, intel core duo2 2.4 GHz, 3ware 9xxx sata raid controller, 2 x 1 G samsung sata harddisc. The colo will be the same, coloclue with whom I still am very happy.

What will change is the OS setup. The old system runs on FreeBSD 8, 64 bits, with an extra jail. The new system runs on vmware vsphere 4.1 (formerly esxi) and ubuntu linux LTS 64 bit.

Why the change? I got extremely frustrated with freebsd. Upgrading the system is a hassle. Binary updates with freebsd-update never seemed to work for me, and cvsup + make buildworld is a bit more of a hassle. But updating the system is a picknick compared to updating ports. With a combo of portupgrade, portmaster and manual updates I got myself more than often in dependency hell. Updating with binaries was preferred, but binaries in freebsd if they are available are extremely minimal, for example, no mysql support in postfix.

Ubuntu may not be better in every aspect, but at least ugrading is so much less of a hassle. apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the trick. I also like the way things are organized with update alternatives and with sites/modules for apache, and the whole configuration scheme. Not all is perfect of course, config is not always consistent, the vmware tools are not available as deb packages and some more things I will encounter. I am also experiencing some performance issues, which I have to resolve.

There are also a lot of things I will miss from freebsd, like pf (ufw is not bad, but is only firewall, not routing or nat), control-t in terminal and things like zfs, d-trace, which I did not use but has a lot of potential.

For now, I am slowly migrating, which is a lot of work and progresses slowly, small changes in the setup needs tuning, I need to migrate site by site, and especially mail is going to be hard. But we are getting there.

Tags: linux,sysadmin,server