I am finalizing the migration of my old to my new server. The last steps where email and dns, and this has been relatively painless. Some things that helped where:
- rsync 3.0.0. It is so much faster than rsync 2.x.
- powerdns. I moved from bind to powerdns with mysql backend. It is quite a joy to have your zones in a mysql database. Change MX records in one go with a simple query.
- poweradmin, a webinterface for powerdns. Not perfect, but combined with mysql queries you have a rather powerful combo.

I am also looking at monitoring with hyperic, which looks promising but uses java. However, nowadays, installing java on freebsd is not so painful anymore as it used to be. Thanks to the freebsdfoundation, you can download a complete package of the sun java jdk with the freebsd patchset applied. See http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml

With the migration I got rid of a lot of old stuff which I do not needed, like
- courier authd, which I used for dovecot imap. Now dovecot imap talks directly to the mysql database.
- amavis. Virusscanning is enduser responsibility. And if you use an OS which is vulnurable for virusses, youre fscked anyway

I am also moving all my domains to transip. I am quite happy with transip, they are cheap, reliable and are based in the Netherlands, so I can also do automatic bank transfers for my costs, and register .nl domains. I am moving a way from gkg, not because gkg is bad, they are actually pretty good and cheap, but they do not do .nl domains, and I would like to have everything under one hood.

Tags: sysadmin,unix,freebsd,java