Yesterday – or was it the day before… – I finally upgraded the server(s) running colino.net and a few other sites…

Before	After

The old ones were nice and fun, being kind of rare Suns – an Ultra1 with a 170MHz CPU and a SparcStation 5 with a 110MHZ CPU. But they were also a pain, with their SCA SCSI disks costing about $100 for 4GB, and their slow CPUs. Plus, they were running a Debian installed in 2001 and full of unmaintainable patched stuff. Plus the fact that MySQL kept crashing on the Ultra1, which is why the SparcStation was still around: database server…
The new one is simply the less pricey stuff I could find, an AMD Sempron at 1.6GHz with 512MB of memory and two 40GB disks. That way I’ve been able to setup RAID1 partitions and don’t worry about one of the disks overheating. The only thing where I spent more than necessary is on the box itself, I wanted a little and well-ventilated one. I got an Antec Minuet which is nice, but not made for RAID :-) I had to put one of the disks in the CDROM slot.

The time needed to transfer the data and configuration, and fix the configuration to match the newer upstream versions, has been a bit too much to my liking, and I didn’t get any sleep between Monday and Tuesday. 36 hours straight without sleeping is something I hadn’t done since I was a student, and it’s not something I missed too much to be honest!
Given the upgrade (10x CPU speed ! ;-), you’ll probably notice the speed increase on this WordPress installation or in Sylpheed-Claws’ bugzilla…

Thanks to Yann for selling me the new server at a really friendly price!