Apologies for the downtime – I took it upon myself to upgrade this server to RHEL5.
The upgrade went pretty smoothly, taking about 6 hours – although that includes a lot of time copying files around. Some sites on this server aren’t back up yet, as I’m taking the opportunity to modernise a few bits of infrastructure here and there. Also, the media folder is completely missing for now – that will take a long time to copy back from my pathetic DSL.
My main reason for upgrading was difficulties I’d had installing various pieces of software – mostly pretty new stuff. Anyone who’s glanced at the CouchDB mailing list in the last few months will likely remember (with a groan) my epic struggle to get the thing working reliably on RHEL4 – that was a lot of hours splashed to the winds there. I’m delighted to be able to report that installation on this clean, modern server went without a hitch. I consider the time it’s taken me to reinstall “paid for” with that development alone.
Other changes include moving to nginx for Rails hosting, decommissioning SVN once and for all, moving to a new and more logical folder structure, revamping users and permissions, a coming public git repository, and other things I’d been wanting to do for a while but didn’t get round to because of the previous mess.
I’ll be renewing my efforts to hew strictly to RPM-installed packages on this OS. Some source installations are inevitable – Ruby and Erlang, for example, are quite old on the default system/package repo so they have to be installed from source. But everything else I’ll be endeavouring to keep as clean as possible for as long as possible – I want absolutely no repeat of the fucking debacle the js/spidermonkey CouchDB prerequisite install turned into.
In-place upgrades are not my usual cup of tea – I’ve made an exception this time because the hardware is still pretty decent, there were no immediately obvious gains in value to be had upgrading that, and I literally couldn’t do what I wanted to with the previous OS. A hardware upgrade is on the cards, however, and in anticipation of that I’ve kept my most detailed install notes ever – literally every command. What took me 6 or so hours (and counting) should take 1 or 2 next time.
Onwards and upwards, then ..
