14 October 2010

This is a blog item that needs to be converted to the new Bliki format

OD moving to a new server

We're moving from eSecureData to Codero today! We were having to pay for about 750G of drive space that we didn't need because eSecureData only has specific hardware packages which meant that we couldn't upgrade to 4GB of RAM (which we really need) without also having a second 500G drive, but we only use about 200G. Codero are much more flexible in terms of hardware allowing us to have 4GB and only 250G of drive space saving us $60 per month.

One draw-back with Codero is that they don't have a very good selection of OS's, we require a modern Debian or Ubuntu, but the closest option they offered was Ubuntu 8.04 which is about two years old now. If you want an OS installed which is not in the list they charge an extra $150 which I wasn't very keen on, so I thought I'd try starting with Ubuntu 8.04 and then doing a do-release-upgrade over ssh.

I ran through the upgrade selecting the package maintainers versions for conflicting configurations, but then the machine didn't come back after reboot. I contacted support over Codero's live chat system and they were able to tell me that the networking hadn't been able to start, and that I could have one free re-imaging back to Ubuntu 8.04 and that subsequent re-images would cost $50 each. I decided to take the free re-imaging and try the upgrade again, then if I failed again I'd pay the $150 for them to install Debian 5.3.

The second time round I was successful and we're now running Ubuntu 10.04! I ran through the upgrade procedure again selecting the package maintainers version of configuration, but this time I backed up the network/interfaces, dhclient.conf and grub/menu.lst which were the files involving the conflicting configuration. At the end of the release upgrade I opted to not reboot, and instead checked what had been done to the conflicting configuration files. The network interfaces file was pretty much the same, but the other two were changed a lot, so I reverted the dhclient.conf to the old state, and manually adjusted grub/menu.lst to the old state but replacing the kernel references with the new one installed for 10.04.

I then rebooted, and was able to ssh back in within a minute or so. I was then able to begin going through our install a new server procedure, starting with the organicdesign-server package which had previously failed to install many packages under Ubuntu 8, but installed perfectly under Ubuntu 10 :-)