Moving

The last time I moved to a different city was 13 years ago. And before that time I had been moving every two years or so. So when I finally settled in 1998, I decided that I was going to stay in one place for a much longer time. It is time now however to move again, I got a new job in a new location and it makes a lot of sense to move. For one, I will have much better house (buying a house in the middle of the credit crunch), with a very nice garden, and it will reduce my traveling time to and from work considerably. Also, the environment is quite nice because my favorite mountainbiking locations are closer and there are also many more opportunities for mountainbiking close by.

One of the most important things when moving is of course…. my server. Of course, I am depending a lot on it. For one it is running my mail server and it also handles a number of mailing lists. It runs 4 web sites, and it is also my VCR (mythtv).

Therefore, it is important to me to minimize downtime of the server during the move. Luckily, I am already prepared for this since I am running the server as a virtual machine already. So as part of the move I will run this virtual machine on my laptop, which gives me plenty of time to disassemble the server rack and set it all up again at my new location. In fact as I am writing this, I am already running the server from my laptop. It is easy for me to do this because my regular server backups are bootable, see here.

Because of this setup, I can minimize the total down time of my web sites to the order of minutes and minimize mail down time to less than possibly one day in total (but no-one will notice that because mail servers retry sending mail).

Interestingly, I had quite a fight today to get things working again with my TVIX M-6500 which allows me to play movies hosted on the server (through NFS) on my TV. As it turns out there are subtle issues with network bridges on linux dropping UDP packages in some cases, see here.  As it turns out, the TVIX uses UDP for NFS, which can give problems with bridged network interfaces on virtual machines in some cases. Luckily, I managed to solve this by replacing the virtio network model on the machine by device emulation of a RTL8139 chipset. Anyway, all is  good now. The server VM is now fully functional again and I can watch movies, send/receive mail and all my websites are up. The only thing I cannot do is record at this time, but ok, this is only for the next 10 days or so. On the 16th of February I hope to be able to start the server again at its new location.