My home server, where this is all served from, was running Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (Sarge). Sarge was first released on 6th of June, 2005. Almost a 5 year run without a reinstall. Pretty good going. Unfortunately the time had come to upgrade as I needed access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5. I did try an upgrade from Debian 3.1 to 5.0.1 (Lenny) but this didn’t go too well. I over-looked running a hand rolled 2.4 kernel with grsecurity enable. I got in to a situation where I couldn’t run any commands at all. As I didn’t have a CDROM drive connected to the server and couldn’t be bothered taken things apart, I accepted that the installation was horribly broken and decided to bite the bullet.

To cut a long story short, I put in two new hard drives, TFTP booted Ubuntu 9.04 and started a clean install of my server. I took the opportunity to configure everything from scratch again. I didn’t fancy trying to re-use old configs and fixing them up to work with the much newer software packages that had jumped a major version or two. It’s now almost complete. Just a few things to finish off, like a hand rolled kernel with grsecurity etc.

As mentioned, one of the main reasons for the upgrade was to gain access to MySQL 5.1 and PHP5 so I could run webapps such as WordPress. My old blog which I wrote from the ground up was too cumbersome and why reinvent the wheel? I just don’t have the time anymore. So here it is.

I’ve also got DokuWiki on the go, so I can easily document specific configs. Mainly so I remember what was done and why and also to help others out there. For example, at the moment I’m writing up my Postfix+Dovecot+dspam notes as the documention I found was bitty and not very well explained.

Also to be wikified will be my High Availability Linux iSCSI cluster notes and a patch for z-push to make it work properly (specifically with the iPhone).