Migration

I have been running my server out of my house for almost 2 years now. Its a nice source of heat in the winter and a good source of noise all year round. I was getting annoyed with it and fedora so in a effort to learn some thing new I set up a old box I found laying around at work a dual pentium3 750 with 4 18 gig SCSI 10000 RPM discs and 1 gig of RAM. I think that should be sufficient for the little to no amount of traffic that my site receives. Setting up the Solaris box was not as easy as say most flavors of Linux make it on you.... but I managed to get it done with a little help from a co-worker. After that came setting up Apache MySQL and PHP. MySQL 5 was a package and went in with no problems at all. I compiled from source the other 2 and if you do not know how I feel about compiling .... I am not a big fan of it... for 2 reasons one dependencies can quickly turn into a nightmare and two when it comes time to update due to a security flaw or any other problem you can be in a hurt locker all over again and need to go through resolving your dependencies and sorting your config line again. That said and since I really need to get faster at compiling and sorting out problems on Solaris 10 in general. I went that way and found that it wasn't as hard as it could have been. Apache was a pretty easy task but PHP was a bit more of a pain. All of the options I needed were not clear from the start so I ended up compiling 4 or 5 times before everything was working right. Eventually I rsync'ed all my all of my data over and got most things working straight away. I updated my Drupal installation as well as my Gallery2 install. The Gallery update proved trouble some and their IRC support was no where near the level that you can get from the people at Drupal. My migration/updates caused me to corrupt a few pictures (actually almost 70 or so) and I am not sure I have gotten all of them replaced in the DB yet. So if you happen across one then let me know... I found out that a little late in the game that my mail server of choice will run on Sun but it is said "that it does not to work well".... the idea of trouble shooting that kinda thing all the time is well not appealing to me at all. So I dug around and found another box and after the urging from some colleges I checked out CentOS4. CentOS is a RED HAT clone that simply takes the available RH source RPMs and removes the RED HAT graphics and trademark data. All perfectly legal and free. The biggest benefit I feel is the extended support life of the OS, and since it is same as RHEL4 it will be around 3 to 4 years... Yes Linux is different and easier. I got it set up and ready to run in about 1 hour. I installed DNS and set it up to mimic my DNS at home with the exception of the IPs. Finally I downloaded the Zimbra RPM for RHEL4, unpacked it and ran the install script. BOOM a fully functional Webmail server running on popular opensource softwares like apache tomcat (not really my taste but) and postfix. There are about a billion things that it can do and while I am not really concerned about how flashy it is I think others will like it. I am impressed by the new HTML phlishing filter built into ClamAV in all it just works and I was able to get it up and running in minutes with little to no problems. So now I have 2 new servers hosted some place special where I can still keep a eye on them and they get all the electricity, bandwidth and LOVE they need! E./