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

So management at my previous company decided that we should go enterprise, thus replacing our unix boxes which run on freebsd or debian with redhat enterprise linux. It's enterprise right, so it should be good? Anyway, redhat is not necessarily that bad, al though a lot less well thought out compared to debian or ubuntu for example. Anyway, the mail server was migrated to redhat, but then we discovered that redhat is extremely conservative with filesystems and only provides ext3 and gfs. Our mailserver still had a mailspool on xfs. This was a bit annoying. So.. centos to the rescue! Centos is the GPL version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So it is mostly identical to redhat, minus some tools. It also uses yum and rpm packages of centos and redhat are interchangeable. Centos is identical to Red Hat, but centos has centos plus, which is a repository with additional goodies. So this solved our problem: we installed a centos plus kernel + headers and xfs tools, and now the server is happily running kerio mail server on redhat EL 5, with xfs. How ever, you do need to realize that your server is no longer a real Red Hat EL server, which affects you getting support. But for now it runs, but don't tell your PHB!

Tags: sysadmin,linux,redhat,centos,xfs