tech.sweetnam.eu

Recently I decided to go into the hosting business. Not in a big way mind you. Just to cover the costs of hosting primarily with perhaps enough left over for a night on the town once a month or to pay the phone bill.

As it happens I was lucky enough in that I had two clients ready to go with over 100 sites each. Starting up a business without having to look for clients is an absolute luxury especially in the middle of one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen. After making all the agreements with my future clients it was time to come up with a concrete migration plan.

Before a single site could be migrated several things needed to be taken into consideration:

• Hardware
• Software (Operating System and Control Panel)
• Support/Knowlegebase/Helpdesk
• Bandwidth requirements
• Data import/migration/compatibility

The hardware was the easiest. I had a spare Dell poweredge 1850 hanging around here at home doing nothing with a not too inconsiderate 6GB of RAM.  The operating system was going to be a simple matter too. It was going to be Linux or nothing. However which Linux distribution to choose?

Choosing the Linux distrubution was going to be directly related to my choice of control panel software. I wrote here sometime back about Virtualmin and I decided that it would be absolutely perfect for my control panel requirements. Having decided on the control panel software it was now up to me to choose between CentOS or Ubutu 8.04LTS as the host OS. In the end out of familiarity I opted for Ubuntu.

One of the key reasons for choosing Virtualmin was its ability to import backups from cPanel. As I would be migrating almost 200 sites from a cPanel server in the U.S. the ability to seamlessly migrate would be an absolute bonus. Another important reason was that the control panel interface itself is very easy to use. Considering that my two future clients were coming from years of using cPanel I was confident that they would easily find their way around Virtualmin.

In February I installed the server into the datacentre and pulled across a couple of cPanel backups to test the import functionality. Of primary concern to me was the existing server was running CentOS and using Exim as its MTA. The new server was the already mentioned Ubuntu and I had decided on Postfix as the MTA. In addition the home folders of the existing server were split between two disks mounted as /home and /home2

So I pulled across two backups, one with /home as its location on the old server and the other with /home2, used the import function and in about 5 minutes both sites had been migrated flawlessly.

I couldn’t have been that lucky I thought to myself. Normally something goes awry especially when there are significant differences in software as well as software versions. I poked around all the config files and was astonished to see that everything looked as it should be.

Over the next week I made out a schedule for migration and before long all sites were up and running. My clients were happy as too were my clients clients. The only issues that cropped up were minor and were as a result of differences in the way Virtualmin handles user accounts compared to cPanel.

So that was over a month ago and with everyone happy I can reflect on what was accomplished. Most notably was there anything I could have done differently or more efficiently.

As it happens yes, there was something I could have done had I thought about it.

The hardware of the server is absolutely overkill for what it is doing. 6GB of RAM is way too much. Over the past month the most I have ever seen in use was just short of 800MB however having lots of free RAM is not a bad thing as Linux likes to use lots of it for cache.

The load on the old server was constantly around the 1.00 to 2.50 mark, the new server with it’s dual core Xeons is barely even breaking a sweat with load averages between 0.03 and 0.12.

What I should have done, and it’s obvious now, is that I should have installed a hypervisor like VMware ESX server and paritioned the physical machine in to three virtual machines. One for each of my two clients and the third for myself.

In any event I have another Poweredge 1850 and a pair of 1750′s that I intend on installing into the datacentre in the not too distant future so now it is time to start planning for that.

To finish off here’s a screenshot:

It’s been absolutely ages since I last wrote here and I had been meaning to do so for some time. Since my last entry I have been tinkering away with my setup as I do on a regular basis and plenty of things have changed here on the back end. I suppose I will begin with my my connection and move up the chain from there.

First up is a new router. I picked up a nice Cisco 837 for a very reasonable price. I had a bit of fiddling to get it up and running with eircom broadband but I got there in the end and I have documented the procedure over on my wiki.

Next up is my reverse proxy. It is still running on the same hardware but I decided to move from Linux over to OpenBSD. My primary reason for this is that I was getting sick and tired of Linux iptables. In addition I concluded that Squids performance wasn’t optimal either. A move to OpenBSD seems to have resolved both those issues for me. PF on BSD is very configurable and easy to understand as well. Needless to say I have documented my experiences with PF over on my wiki also.

I’ve also gotten my hands on some new hardware. Well new hardware to me that is. I picked up three Sun Netra T1 servers, a Dell PowerEdge 1750 and two Symantec 5420 Firewall appliances.

So far I have been busy setting up the three Netras. They don’t have CD-ROM drives or display adapters so I had to install them over the network which was a process that was actually relatively simple. However it was only simple in that I already have a couple of other Sun machines here one of which I was able to use as an install server. Of course I have this process documented on my wiki also.

I haven’t decided what I will use the Netras for yet. One of them seems to have CPU problems and has been cannabilised to increase the specs. of the other two. They have 500Mhz UltraSparc IIe CPUs so by todays standards are not at all that powerful but they do draw very little power, certainly less than a Pentium IV machine so I may set them up as file servers. Initially I was hoping to install OpenBSD on one of them to use as my reverse proxy but unfortunately an OpenBSD network install does not seem to be as straight forward as Solaris.

The Poweredge 1750 I had hoped to set up as a webserver running either IIS or Apache. Unfortunately it only has 512MB of RAM so until I get some more for it that rules out Server 2008. However it is incredibly loud and that rules out keeping it running in my computer room. I am currently planning on setting up a dedicated computer room as it were in another part of the house so check back here for update on that.

Engineer arrived today and swapped out the PSU (again), Mainboard (again) and this time also replaced the CPU.

It’s back in action. Ubuntu is installed and running away happily. In fact I’m using this machine now to type this out.

Now that it is back in action, it is time to put it to the use I had intended. As it has 2GB of RAM this machine is now going to be tasked with being my Virtual Server. My current plan is to migrate the server this blog is running on over to a virtual server. However that’s going to have to wait until the weekend.