What better way to start the new year than with a server upgrade?
My desktop system was replaced with a New! Shiny! Intel Core 2 Duo system before Christmas, and that freed up some hardware to be used for the server that hosts this website. I simultaneously wanted to replace the aging Debian install with a fresh Ubuntu server install. It’s all gone rather well, considering that it was a major, MAJOR upgrade, and it’s basically done in less than a day. Here’s a quick summary of what I did:
- Server upgraded from a Pentium-something and 512MiB RAM to an AMD64 Athlon with 2 GiB of RAM
- Debian stable replaced with Ubuntu 8.10 Server
- Cyrus IMAP server replaced with Dovecot
- Bind8 upgraded to Bind9
- Zope 2.9 + CMFPlone updated to latest repository builds
- WordPress upgraded to 2.7
- Various other software upgraded as a result of going to Ubuntu 8.10
The new hardware alone has dramatically improved things. Mail is processing at least twice as quickly. Web pages are loading, much, much faster than before. There was a noticable delay in pulling up the main seafelt.com page, which is served from Zope. It’s now near instant over the LAN, so you guys should be seeing much improved page load times, too.
I’d been planning this upgrade in my head for a few weeks now, and was starting to dread having major issues. In the past, there’s always been some little issue that pops up and makes everything hard. Usually something relating to software dependencies.
The ease of this upgrade is a credit to the Ubuntu guys. I really am just loving this distro now, and can’t really see a reason for using any other distro for all my computing needs. I’ve now got 3 servers with Ubuntu, and a laptop. The 8.x series is tremendously usable, stable, and things just work. Which is ace.
Now it’s a few days of watching to see all the automated systems roll through and make sure everything works as before. Then I can decommission the old server for good. Hooray!