In what I feel to be a legendary bout of server maintenance, I have installed a new server and migrated everything over to it. That feeling of accomplishment, smug satisfaction and self-congratulatory euphoria is washing over me.
It wasn’t that the existing production server was all that old. It’s just that my backup server was ancient. And one day recently it just died.
Replacing a backup server didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I subscribe to the theory that when you buy a computer, you should buy the biggest, baddest, most powerful machine you can afford because whatever you get will be obsolete in a week anyway. But the more capable a machine you buy, the more time will elapse before you need/want to replace it.
So I broke the Jungle’s piggy bank and got a 3.0Ghz machine with 4GB RAM and 500GB of storage space.
That was the easy part.
I also moved the server OS to the latest version of its Linux distribution. And I finally took the plunge and dropped Sendmail in favour of Postfix. Whoever said it was a drop-in replacement for Sendmail really needs more public ridicule than they already get.
Because, of course, email servers aren’t just the MTA these days. There’s the list server, the anti-spam stuff and the virus stuff, and SMTP authentication… and… and… and. Finally after poring over page after page of HOW-TOs, man pages, READMEs and what not I finally have it.
So when I noticed my website wasn’t working (fortunately mine was the only one) , merely grepping through the CMS code looking for outdated SQL syntax, seemed practically like wizard clicking. Thanks Mike, for the help.
And so with the stack re-stacked and the disk drives intact, I brought the machine back up. Which left me plenty of time to learn about IPTables. Which kinda makes Sendmail look like Tetris. But that’s for another day. Server maintenance accomplishment unlocked.
