@ 14 Dec 09

zecrazytux.net migration on november 09: notes

I migrated from boulz.org (colocation with friends), hosted on a Lost Oasis VPS running NetBSD 5.0 to a little dedicated server (DomU), flocke.bearstech.com running NetBSD 5.0.1 gracefully provided by Bearstech (thanks Bears ;))

We had a lot of availability problems with Lost Oasis' hosting and the administrators did not give a fuck about it. They rejected the fault on NetBSD (Most of them are GNU/Linux users).

Here are some notes about the migration / uncommon steps

Data migration

I use Subversion whenever it is possible (website, user/shell configuration), it eases the migration:

     svnadmin dump | load
 

‘just works’, that’s very practical.

SNMP counter64 on NetBSD

Monitoring thanks to SNMP protocol (and cacti, nagios…), but looking for counter64 (64 bits data with specific OIDs/MIB).

net-snmp 5.4.2 in pkgsrc 2009Q3 does not support these OIDs. A patch has been integrated in net-snmp 5.5 for NetBSD (‘[PATCH 2435681]: Enable if-mib rewrite (with sysctl backend) on NetBSD’), and can be manually backported into pkgsrc.

TODO: warn pkgsrc maintainers !

GNU Screen 256 colors support

Screen does not support 256 colors by default but it can be added by manually patching its pkgsrc Makefile (—enable-colors256)

TODO: mail pkgsrc maintainer again