My good friend, Rob, hosts my site for me, in return for helping with server
maintenance. After being on Gentoo for the past three years, though, we
decided it was time to switch to something a little easier to maintain, so
last night we wiped the system partitions and installed Ubuntu server.
I'll say this: the setup is much faster! However, we had a few gotchas that
surprised us -- it didn't setup our RAID array out-of-the-box, which led to
a good hour of frustration as we tried to verify that the install wouldn't
wipe it, and then to verify that we could re-assemble it. (We succeeded.)
Additionally, we second-guessed a few things we shouldn't have, which led to
needing to back out and reconfigure. But what was over a 12 hour install
with Gentoo we accomplished in a matter of a few hours with Ubuntu server --
so it was a huge success that way.
Unfortunately, our mysqldump of all databases... wasn't, a fact we
discovered only after importing it into the new system. I ended up losing my
blog database and PEAR channel database. Fortunately, the PEAR channel
has not changed at all in the past year, so we had an old backup that
worked, and I had a snapshot of my blog database from three weeks ago I was
able to use. As a result, there are a few missing entries, but for the most
part, all works. If you commented on one of those missing entries, my
apologies.
Now that the install is done, I'm also finalizing some design changes to my
blog -- it's time to leave the black and white for more colorful grounds.
Look for a revamp in the coming weeks!
