So I did it, purchased another VPS and decided to commit to a year
with openbsd.amsterdam. So far I have not been disappointed, the VM
was set up during a holiday! I get regular emails about planned
updates or service additions, nothing trying to sell me anything. I'm
very happy so far.
## Server Migration
If you have read my previous post you would know that I already had a
Linux VPS with A2 hosting. I expected there to be some snags moving
to openbsd but some of them I really wasn't expecting.
Many of my shell scripts would not work without significant
modifications, even though I used mksh on Linux. Many of the problems
were due to GNU extensions to base utilities like sed, awk, date that
I'd inadvertantly used. I got so fed up at one point that I installed
gawk just to have inline file modification.
Firstly I moved my gopher hole and all associated software, there was
a lot more than I realised.. I then moved my git repositories and set
up git. This transferred everything I was hosting from home which
has allowed me to start shutting down my desktop computer at night
and hopefully save a little on the electricity bill.
Next I moved my static business website and domain, while leaving the
email where it was. I then copied across the remaining websites,
which included a MediaWiki and Wordpress sites. After that I dumped
the databases and copied those across too.
Getting the websites to work was a little more involved than I
thought. Webservers on OpenBSD (openhttpd and nginx) both run inside
a chroot. Due to the way partitions are assigned on the VM /var
doesn't have much space so I wanted to put the websites on the home
partition. In order to achieve this I had to change quite a few paths
, including that of the php-fpm.sock. It proved to be a bit of a faff
but I got there in the end. Also the database wouldn't connect on
localhost but for some reason worked on 127.0.0.1.
After I got the first site working I, one by one, changed the DNS to
point the domain names to the IP address of the new server. During
this process I set up nsd, which is the OpenBSD domain name server.
I had been meaning to host my own DNS again after I had some issues
transferring my business domain. On transferring the domain from my
previous registrar I had to wait and didn't know when it would happen
exactly. When the domain did finally transfer none of the zone
information was carried across, resulting in a short outage. It
wasn't the first time I'd had problems like this and I didn't want
that happening again so now I'm hosting it again myself.
All that remains now is to move my email, which I have been
procrastinating over because the last time I did it, things didn't go
so well...
