Site outage

[IanKennedy]

So the operating system that we use on the server is going out of support at the end of this month. Even though this has been known for quite a while then still sold me a new server in December, which is quite annoying. That said I only pay monthly and I can swap to a new version whenever I want. The only downside is that the system is pretty much now dead. Out of interest it is CentOS, which has basically been superseded by Alma, which is a fork of CentOS.

Now, jumping major versions of any Linux is prone with difficulties, for some reason I've never been able to figure out. Typically it is recommended that you get a new server and then migrate your system from one to the other. Which is what I did in December of last year. Now I'm having to go through this all again.

I found something that potentially allowed me to upgrade in place, called centos2alma, which would convert CentOS 7.9 to Alma 8. In the process of testing that in place upgrade I found some changes that were required for it to operate. (for example renaming your ether net adapters from something like eth0, eth1 to something that would be fixed and known. A good idea, but one that ultimately proved quite difficult to do, so much so that I broke the server during testing. I think I named the two adapters with the same name, silly me.

The fix took a very long time, as it took ages to get the hosting company to connect a KVM (remote keyboard, mouse and video adapter) to the server. Even when they did it proved completely broken, unless you read some sort of alien text. That took until next day to resolve. After being provided with a different method of controlling the server. I was able to rewind my changes, which would have fixed the problem. Except that the ethernet adapter seemed to though a complete mental breakdown and refused to talk to anyone outside of itself. Kicking the host again that was fixed and we're back in operation.

Oh the fun of Linux, even with 33 years of professional experience, it can really fook you up.

OK, now we're back in the place we started a few days ago. I've now ordered a new server and we'll so a migration from one to the other.

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

Thanks for the update Ian, and for all you do to keep the place running.

I had been concerned as I had tried quite a few times to get on site, but I am thankful you have it back up.

Thanks again!

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Thanks for letting us know about it, Ian.

[Nutso]

Thank you, Ian.