2014 Server Migration: Difference between revisions
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== Server selection == |
== Server selection == |
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On 2014-06-24, the WPLUG board decided to go with the $10/month [https://www.linode.com/pricing?r=30335eb136f2c5f7fa3429dce9f15bea836f81d3 Linode] plan, locating in their Atlanta datacenter. This plan will approximately halve our current costs and still provide sufficient resources. |
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Other options are possible; for example [https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing Digital Ocean] has a $5/month plan that has less horsepower but should still be sufficient for our needs. The main benefit is that costs would be halved again. |
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You can add your suggestions in this section. Note that web hosting is not sufficient; we need a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated server to accommodate our mailing lists and IRC bot. Since we've been very happy with the service we've gotten from Linode and are comfortable with how it works, please support alternative suggestions with a compelling case for how they'd be an improvement. |
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== OS selection == |
== OS selection == |
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Revision as of 06:09, 26 June 2014
This page is to collect information about our current configuration and options for switching to a new server going forward. Please feel free to edit to add missing information or correct errors.
Server selection
On 2014-06-24, the WPLUG board decided to go with the $10/month Linode plan, locating in their Atlanta datacenter. This plan will approximately halve our current costs and still provide sufficient resources.
OS selection
The WPLUG server currently runs on CentOS 5. This is still supported, but it would make sense to choose a newer distro while we're doing the server switch.
Service enumeration
Services that are currently running on the WPLUG Linode server. These should include things that are user-facing only, not infrastructure.
- E-mail (Postfix)
- Mailing lists (Mailman)
- Wiki (MediaWiki)
- Blog (Wordpress)
- Monkeybot IRC bot (infobot) - maybe consider different bot software that can import monkeybot's database?
- RSS aggregator (Tiny Tiny RSS, tt-rss)
Infrastructure software which supports the services above.
- Web server (Apache) - it would be possible to use Nginx instead, but I (Vance) am not familiar with setting it up
- PHP (Apache mod_php) for MediaWiki, Wordpress, and TT-RSS
- Python for Mailman
- Perl for Monkeybot
- MySQL for MediaWiki, Wordpress, and TT-RSS - likely possible to use MariaDB instead, other DBMS not recommended for use with MediaWiki
- Greylisting daemon (Postgrey)
- Fail2ban - could maybe use denyhosts instead
Support lifetime
- CentOS 6 - 2020-11-30
- CentOS 7 - not released yet, will probably match RHEL 7 support deadline of 2024-06-30
- Debian 7 "wheezy" - one year after release of v. 8 "jessie" (anticipated mid-2015), possible unofficial long-term support available after that
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - 2019-04-17
Software availability
This table is to track, for the different distros under consideration, whether the software we need is available within its repositories. We want to minimize the number of applications which have to be maintained manually.
Key:
- B: in distro's base repository
- A: in an additional repository provided by the distro
- T: in a third-party repository
- ~: not available in any known repository
- ?: availability unknown
| CentOS 6 | CentOS 7 | Debian 7 | Ubuntu 14.04 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| postfix | B 2.6 | B 2.10.1 | B 2.9 | B 2.11 |
| mailman | B 2.1 | A 2.1.15 latest | B 2.1 | B 2.1 |
| postgrey | T 1.34rf, EPEL | T 1.34EPEL | B 1.34 | A 1.34 |
| mediawiki | T 1.19EPEL | ? | B 1.19 | A 1.19 |
| wordpress | T 3.9EPEL | T 3.9.1EPEL | B 3.6 | A 3.8 |
| infobot | ~ | ? | ? (not B or A) | ~ |
| tt-rss | ~ | ? | ? (not B or A) | A 1.11 |
| apache | B 2.2 / A 2.4 | A 2.4.6latest | B 2.2 | B 2.4 |
| nginx | A 1.4 | ? | B 1.2 | B/A 1.4 |
| php5 | B 5.3 / A 5.4, 5.5 | A 5.4.16latest, T 5.5.13Remi | B 5.4 | B 5.5 |
| python2 | B 2.6 / A 2.7 | B 2.7.5 | B 2.7 | B 2.7 |
| python3 | A 3.3 | ? | B 3.2 | B 3.4 |
| perl5 | B 5.10 | B 5.16.3 | B 5.14 | B 5.18 |
| mysql | B 5.1 / A 5.5 | ? | B 5.5 | B 5.5 / A 5.6 |
| mariadb | A 5.5 | A 5.5.35latest | ? (not B or A) | A 5.5 |
| fail2ban | T 0.8.7rf, 0.8.11EPEL | T 0.8.7rf | B 0.8.6 | A 0.8.11 |
| denyhosts | T 2.6rf, EPEL | T 2.6rf | B 2.6 | ~ |
Third-party repositories:
- EPEL - Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux
- rf - RepoForge (formerly RPMForge/Dag Wieers)
- Remi - Remi Repository
Migration steps
Put some stuff here.
Nice-to-haves
We have an archive of static web pages from the pre-2007 server "penguin" - it would be nice to make this history available somehow.