Roundup: Server Things
Posted by stephen on Monday, 19th June, 2006 @ 01:56
And finally.... I took it upon myself yesterday to sort out Neuron, mine and Cal's original hosted server prior to Neuron2, where this site, along with countless others (most of them his), now come from. The original Neuron is still functional though, acting as secondary mail exchanger and DNS server, along with hosting some sites we never got around to migrating to Neuron2.
I generally hate RedHat, but unfortunately at the the time of getting Neuron I wasn't familiar with the procedure to remotely reinstall a machine with Debian (which I fortunately did manage to do by the time Neuron2 came along). My solution at the time was to run Debian inside a chrooted environment on the native RedHat 7.3 server. And it's worked pretty well, everything considered. But it was running woody, with all kinds of bits of backports, and of course underneath all that was RedHat 7.3, so it was hideously out of date and no doubt massively insecure whilst also being an upgrade nightmare.
A quick review of the EV1 account admin system for Neuron revealed that those lovely people at EV1 had given us serial console access at some point in the past. This gave me some confidence that I'd be able to pull off another remote reinstall. Knowing that you can get to the system before the OS loads, especially when the bootloader is GRUB, is certainly comforting and useful!
My choice for the upgrade was a little out of sorts from my usual Debian server plan. But I'm pretty sure it's the route I'll take in future wherever possible. I decided to have a crack at installing Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS on the box. LTS stands for long term support, and means that Canonical, the British company behind Ubuntu pledge to support the server edition for five years per version. Which is very comforting too.
Ubuntu is effectively a stabilised version of the latest development version of Debian. So I feel very at home using it and have had great experiences of it as a desktop Linux OS. APT makes my world a better place.
And having all the latest versions of Apache/PHP/MySQL etc is a definite boon as I otherwise tend to use Dotdeb and other backports to make sarge (current Debian stable release) more useful for me.
Being Debian based meant I could also apply the instructions for a remote Debian installation mentioned above. Except it's a little bit different, as things have changed since that was originally written so I had to make some of it up as I went along as I couldn't find anything more recent.
With the help of the serial console (and the lack of help of the two ethernet interfaces on the server being detected in a random order, so the IPs didn't always get assigned to the correct interface) I got everything up and running again.
I also somehow managed to prune 24Gb of stuff from Neuron's disk that was no longer of any use before moving it over to Neuron2 (and then moving it back again).
It didn't take long to re-establish the machine as a secondary MX and DNS for Neuron2. Only this time it's configured in a much nicer and more secure way so that Neuron2 doesn't have passwordless root access to Neuron.
As with anything I do, I never get it all finished in one go, so those few remaining sites are running inside the original chroot, but this time only MySQL and Apache are needed from it. And migrating them to Apache2 and a proper MySQL install shouldn't be too great a problem.
This weekend has really reminded me why I love Linux.
