Hey guys! Linux rant, incoming!
I'm most likely going to be changing the Linux distro that powers spectere.net in the near future. Right now I have it running on Arch but I've had enough systemd-related issues that it's gotten to the point that I'm afraid to update packages. It seems like 9 times out of 10, systemctl completely breaks after an update and keeps me from being able to, well, do much of anything. I shouldn't have to reboot my server (hard reboot, no less...when systemd freaks out everything goes to shit) to update Apache, dammit!
I've also had numerous issues on the VPS that hosts my Minecraft server, namely with the units breaking in very,
very mysterious ways, and the logs are of almost no help. Every time I fire up a server instance or even try to restart one it's a nail biting experience. It looks like everything is correct with my units and shell scripts, and when it works it works well. The problem is that it mysteriously fails 25% of the time, requiring me to run around in circles for ten minutes. In contrast, I've set up little home Minecraft servers on Gentoo (which uses OpenRC on top of sysvinit) that work perfectly.
Of course, the natural question after this is: which distro do I go to? As much as I'd prefer
not to have to build everything from source, I'm pinning for Gentoo at this point. Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu) chugged the Kool-aid and is going to systemd with their next major release (no doubt because GNOME3
requires that travesty now), I'm allergic to RPM-based distros after numerous bad experiences with RHEL and Fedora (so that rules out openSUSE, Fedora, and CentOS) and I'm simply not familiar enough with Slackware to be comfortable using it.
So yeah, I guess I'm going to be rolling with Gentoo.
What does that mean for the site, exactly? Well, not a whole lot from a user standpoint. When I moved over to the VPS in the first place I was smart enough to throw the data on a separate volume. My migration plan right now is as follows (note that this server is named "freyr":
- Spin up a new Linode.
- Install and configure Apache, MySQL, PHP, et al.
- Kill the MySQL server on freyr and unmount the data partition.
- Throw a "WE'LL BE BACK AFTER THESE MESSAGES" thing up on all subdomains.
- Clone the data drive to the new Linode.
- Update DNS records.
- After the DNS propagates, smite freyr with the fury of Odin.
As a result, downtime should be minimal: an estimated 30-40 minutes to clone the disk image to the new node and however long it takes for the DNS records to propagate (I'll crank the TTL down to a fairly low value before I do the migration so that it falls out of the DNS cache relatively quickly).
I don't have a specific date/time set aside right now, but I'll give you guys a heads up at least a few days before I transition everything over.