The big Scummbox shakeup!

This entry is being written on the brand new pre-prod scummbox! Weird to write a blog post that could not see the light of day for potential months!

As of yesterday, I decided that pants, the existing scummbox, is getting long in the tooth. It’s an old Celeron 333 maching that I got for free from a company that was throwing a tonne of them out. It lived a hard life before I got it, and it’s lived a harder life since then.

Pants has had cats chew on its power cables, rained on, dropped, had catastrophic power failures and still runs tickity-boo 99% of the time. But that 1% is out there, and I don’t want to get burned.

So I’ve made New Pants! New Pants is running much newer hardware (AMD X2 processor, 2gb of ram) and with a lot more storage (1TiB vs 40GiB) in a well-ventilated case. There has also been a complete OS changeover from the old FreeBSD 5.4 to a current version of Gentoo Linux.

As I type, I’m configuring mail services and copying over some test sites to see how things deal with my Apache/PHP/MySQL installs. WordPress has dealt well with the change, and theoretically mail delivery and webmail are running, too!

The problem will be identifying all the different processes running on Pants, and replicating them on the new machine. Already Apache 2 has changed how I store sites and configure virtual servers… but I’m not expecting it all to be smooth sailing.

Well, another post that no one will see once this build is closer to finished!

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