25 Apr 09 Server Migration?

I’ve been renting a dedicated server from 1&1 Hosting (yes that’s my affiliate link) for a little over a year now. I’ve been very happy with it, it has allowed me to run several websites, host an IRC server, a TeamSpeak server, Subversion, and Trac. I even very briefly ran a Call of Duty server on it! It is currently running Fedora Core 6, which was old even when I got it a year ago. I’ve been itching to re-image it to something that is supported, and I think I’m finally going to do it. It makes sense to get this done before I go live with SG101 2.0. The only question now is what OS should I go with?

A year ago there wasn’t very many OS options with 1&1. Now, they have 17 variants, including CentOS, openSUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu, with various permutations of the Plesk control panel. I think the safe choice here is to switch to CentOS 5 with Plesk 9. This distribution is currently very similar to FC6 and comes with a newer version of Plesk, which I rely on a lot. However, it would be very cool to run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, since that is also what I am developing with on my laptop.  I think it would minimize surprises to have the same OS on both production and development. And, I’d really like to use at least Python 2.5. FC6 and CentOS 5 are still using Python 2.4.

Unfortunately, 1&1 does not offer Plesk with this configuration. Hmmm, can I take the training wheels off and manage a server without Plesk? Here are the things that Plesk makes easy for me with their web GUI:

1. Creation of domains and subdomains.
2. Managing the mail server.
3. Rotating Apache server logs.
4. Easy access to phpMyAdmin.
5. Quick dashboard like status for how much memory and disk space I am using.
6. Webstats.
7. Maybe some things I don’t know about? This frightens me.

So the question becomes, can I manage these things without Plesk? Let’s see:

1. Apache. I’ve had to heavily customize the Apache configuration files generated by Plesk in order to get Python apps running. I think I’m comfortable now with Apache, and I can just save off the Plesk configuration files for future reference. I don’t anticipate any problems with this.
2. Mail. This is a big mystery to me. I didn’t even know the server was running QMail until last night. Fortunately, I don’t make heavy use of the mail server. I only use it for simple redirects. I have about 10 or so redirects. Getting the equivalent functionality running under Ubuntu may require some research on my part.
3. Log rotation. I’m sure I could come up with some cron jobs to handle log rotation. I assume Plesk is using cron for this, and perhaps I can see how it is doing it.
4. phpMyAdmin. I’m pretty sure I can just install phpMyAdmin myself using an Ubuntu package.
5. Server stats. Not a huge loss, I can use the command line to get the same information.
6. Webstats. I could probably install this myself, but to be honest, I don’t really look at these that much.
7. The unknown. It should be “interesting” to find out what I am missing. Gulp.

So after thinking long and hard about this, I think going with Ubuntu will be a good choice for the long term. Having similar production and development environments will be important. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still has (I think) about 4 years left for server support, and there should be a migration path to the next LTS release.

However leaving Plesk behind will require me to become more of a server geek. This, I don’t actually mind, as I am enjoying learning all this stuff  slowly over time. I can practice some of these things on my laptop before I make the big switch. I need to figure out the mail server thing, and doing a dry run of moving the MySQL databases from production to my development server.

Another important question is when to do this? Ideally I will want to give myself plenty of time, perhaps over a long weekend. It will mean downtime for the current hosted websites. And it will probably be pretty nerve wracking. I’ll be thinking about these things and blogging about them over the course of the next few days.

Tags: migration, Server