2024 Server Migration

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

Linode has been acquired by Akamai and raised their prices. Could potentially downgrade from the $12/mo (2GB RAM) plan to the $5 (1GB RAM "Nanode") plan depending on distro system requirements. Could also consider dropping paid backup service or using something different.

Other VPS providers can be considered, not sure if they are any cheaper/better.

OS selection

CentOS Linux is dead. CentOS Stream is only viable as long as Red Hat/IBM has a business case for it. Can consider other options like pure Debian or Ubuntu LTS.

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)
• Monkeybot IRC bot (infobot)
  • While one of the oldest WPLUG services, since freenode is essentially dead, there may not be good reason to keep it alive.
• Ticketing system (Trac)
  • This is virtually unused, likely not worth deploying.

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 - could be replaced with PHP-FPM
• Let's Encrypt for TLS certificate
• Python for Mailman, Let's Encrypt, and Trac
• Perl for Monkeybot
• MariaDB for MediaWiki - may be possible to use SQLite or PostgreSQL instead
• Greylisting daemon (Postgrey)
• Fail2ban

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.