Server Maintenance

In the absence of female distraction, I took the opportunity in recent weeks to upgrade all of the machines in the house to Fedora 7, including the MythTV box.

A couple of years ago, with a few weeks still to go before the birth of Eloïse, I took advantage of the calm before the storm to move my domain to dedicated hosting at managed.com. Unfortunately, and as I’ve documented in the past, that company turned out to be less than dedicated, so after a year, caliban.org ended up back in our cellar, hosted over a domestic DSL line.

With the girls out of the country for a while, the time was ripe to move the domain back out to dedicated hosting. The DSL line has been incredibly reliable, but there’s always the chance that it will go on the blink while we’re travelling. Moving house would also automatically mean downtime, which is out of the question when one is responsible for one’s own domain e-mail. Downtime means lots of bounced e-mail, not to mention an unreachable Web site.

I’d done my homework before the girls left for their trip, so with the new contract signed, the slow process of copying all of our files over the slow upstream DSL link to the new server began. The process wouldn’t be completed until approximately ten days later.

As you read this, all services have been migrated to the new machine (and have been for over a week).

For you, the user, there shouldn’t be much noticeable difference, except that browsing our photo gallery should be considerably faster than before. For me, however, it’s nice to know that the continuity of our e-mail and Web site is no longer tied to our home DSL being up.

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