Well, I bit the bullet this week and started migrating an old community website from Windows NT to Ubuntu. I took time off work to do this. Some people spend their vacations on a beach, but not me. I spend mine fighting with hardware and software.
I opted for the Turnkey Linux (ubuntu Hardy) appliance for my dev environment. As I said in a previous post, it setup in a heartbeat, so that was an advantage in getting started. Since I had to add things like postfix, spamassassin, courier, updated VIM, and a discussion forum, it would have been nice if to be able to snapshot the dev environment at a stable point and move it up to VPS.NET, but they never replied to my questions about that possibility. I had to get going, so I booked a 3 node VPS package with them to start.
Now you have to understand. The current site is running on Windows NT, with 256MB of RAM on a Pentium III. It runs XMail, MySQL, Perl, PHP, IIS (4) a discussion forum with 2000 members, and a Wordpress blog. Other than the fact that the hardware is starting to die, it’s chugged along just fine.
I figured 3 nodes with 756MB of RAM should be ok to start with on a Linux environment. It’s not that heavily-loaded a site. It does about 15GB a month of traffic.
For the most part the migration went well, except that I’d seen the VPS just lock up for no apparent reason earlier this week. Tech support suggested it could be a low memory issue, and I wrote it off to the fact that I was doing a restore of the discussion forum at the time. Then it locked up again today (and the only way to recover is a cold reboot). This time I was just trying to get a basic admin login page to load.
And then about 30 minutes ago, it died completely. I can’t get it to restart. I’m waiting for support to get back to me.
I was hoping to be able to push the new site live tonight, but apparently THAT isn’t going to happen. Support has been responsive up until now, but I’m completely bummed by the fact that it’s so completely dead after all that work.
(newsflash, support thinks it has to do with a Linux kernel bug. GREAAAAT. Just what I need.)
Damn.
3:38am Status update:
Waited 25 mins for a reply from support and then called them. On the plus side, prompt and responsive phone support 24/7. I was told they are having a problem with one of the hypervisors and are actively trying to fix it (would have been nice if they’d updated the ticket with that). I am going to bed and hoping the problem is resolved in the morning. The question is, is this stable enough to flip the switch and actually migrate my site to it? Am I going to regret this decision?