2024 Server Migration
This page is to collect information about our current configuration and options for switching to a new server going forward, since CentOS 7 goes end-of-life at 2024-06-30. 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.
Cloud Plans
Looking at 1GB and 2GB plans.
| Vendor | Plan | $/Mo | Memory | CPU | Storage | Transfer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linode | Nanode 1GB | $5 | 1GB | 1 | 25GB | 1TB |
| Linode | Linode 2GB | $12 | 2GB | 1 | 50GB | 2TB |
| DigitalOcean | 1GiB | $6 | 1GiB | 1 | 25GiB | 1TB |
| DigitalOcean | 2GiB | $12 | 2GiB | 1 | 50GiB | 2TB |
| Hostwinds | $4.99 | 1GB | 1 | 30GB | 1TB | |
| Hostwinds | $9.90 | 2GB | 1 | 50GB | 2TB | |
| Vultr | $5 | 1GB | 1 | 25GB | 1TB | |
| Vultr | $10 | 2GB | 1 | 55GB | 2TB |
All services seem to be similar, with price differences only by a dollar or two.
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 (certbot)
- 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
Support lifetime
- CentOS Stream 9 - 2027-05-31 (limited to RHEL Full Support lifetime)
- Rocky Linux 9 - 2032-05-31
- AlmaLinux 9 - 2032-05-31
- Debian 12 "bookworm" - 2028-06-10 or later
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - 2027-04
System requirements
| CPU | RAM | Disk | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CentOS / Rocky / Alma 9 | amd64, arm64, ppc64el | 1.5 GB | 10 GB |
| Debian 12 | amd64, arm64, i386 (686 or higher), ppc64el, mipsel, mips64el | 512 MB | 4 GB |
| Ubuntu 22.04 | 1 GHz amd64, arm64, ppc64el | 1 GB | 2.5 GB |
Currently we are using 22 GB of disk, as follows:
594M /boot 35M /etc 11G /home - monkeybot.log is 7.3GB 25M /opt 2.2G /root 4.0K /srv 36K /tmp 2.1G /usr 6.3G /var
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 / Rocky / Alma 9 | Debian 12 | Ubuntu 22.04 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| postfix | B 3.5.9 | B 3.7.5 | B 3.6.4 |
| mailman | ~ | B 3.3.8 | A (3) 20200530 |
| postgrey | T 1.37EPEL | B 1.37 | A 1.36 |
| mediawiki | ~ | B 1.39 | A 1.35 |
| infobot | ~ | ~ | ~ |
| trac | ~ | A 1.6 (backports) | A 1.5.3 |
| apache | B 2.4.53 | B 2.4.57 | B 2.4.52 |
| nginx | B 1.20.1 / 1.22.1 | B 1.22.1 | B 1.18.0 |
| php | B 8.0 / 8.1 | B 8.2 | B 8.1 |
| php-fpm | B 8.0 / 8.1 | B 8.2 | A 8.1 |
| python2 | ~ | ~ | A 2.7.18 |
| python3 | B 3.9.16 | B 3.11.2 | B 3.10.4 |
| perl5 | B 5.32 | B 5.36 | B 5.34 |
| mariadb | B 10.5 | B 10.11 | A 10.6 |
| mysql | B 8.0 | ~ | B 8.0 |
| sqlite | B 3.34 | B 3.40 | B 3.37 |
| fail2ban | T 1.0.2EPEL | B 1.0.2 | A 0.11.2 |
| certbot | T 2.6.0EPEL | B 2.1.0 | A 1.21.0 |
Third-party repositories:
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.
Migration Notes
New virtual server:
- Name: penguin
- OS: Debian 12
- Region: Atlanta
- Plan: Nanode 1GB
- IPv4: 139.144.29.132
- IPv6: 2600:3c02::f03c:94ff:fe10:c62f
New staging server:
- Name: nestling
- OS: Debian 11
- Region: Chicago
- Plan: Nanode 1GB
- IPv4: 172.234.26.233
- IPv6: 2600:3c06::f03c:95ff:fed6:b745
This server was selected to run this OS version and location because it was the only image and location that featured cloud-init which was necessary for automated builds. Once Debian 12 gets that feature, we'll migrate over.
Server Setup Steps
I'm setting up ansible to do the server build and configuration entirely. Nesting is the staging server. Here are the steps completed:
- Create or rebuild new linode, with cloud-init that adds admin users and ssh public keys.
- Set hostname, /etc/hosts, disable root ssh login
- Add board group and create board home directory
- apt update
- Install apache, mariadb, php
- Install and run certbot
- Install mediawiki and restore images and sql data
- Mail - mua, postfix, opendkim, SPF, DKIM, DMARC
- Backup mediawiki data and config for future rebuild and migration
- Restore mediawiki data and config
- Add ufw management and set up firewall
- fail2ban complete and added to penguin also
- mail aliases
- established staging.wplug.org subdomain
- mailman3 installation finally successful
Currently working on:
- mailman3 - final configuration
Next steps:
- migrate mailman 2.1 to 3