Finally modernizing my infrastructure

I have been "working" on some major upgrades to my home computing infrastructure for several months now (and by "working", I mean mostly playing Mario Kart with Kevin). My main server, redefine was getting a little stale - the OS was stuck on FreeBSD 4.x, I was clinging to Apache 1.3.x, and Movable Type was stuck on version 2.6, and was really spam-prone as a result. Plus, the hardware was getting pretty noisy, and I wasn't doing so good about having RAID and backups of my disks.

So, I have finally stiched together enough time to get all of these things fixed. Back in January, I bought two 400Gb SATA drives and a RAID controller. I slapped this new hardware into one of my older machines (dual Pentium Pros upgraded to Dual Pentium II's, baby!), and installed FreeBSD 6. I then installed the latest Apache, Movable Type, etc., and got everything configured. And above all, I am running on mirrored drives now. Disks and RAID controllers are so cheap nowadays, that it really didn't make much sense to have a single point of failure with my most important data.

The biggest challenge was in getting all of my data moved over from the old setup to the new setup. Good old rsync handled bringing all of my static data in the home directories over. However, the Movable Type upgraded wanted me to switch from BerkeleyDB to MySQL, which required getting MySQL configured (not necessarily my forte, but I got it to go), and then converting all of the blog data. I had some issues, but luckily the Movable Type forums and documentation are pretty solid.

So, there may be broken-ness abound for the next few days. Right now, for example, my blog will take comments, but they appear to be going into some moderation system that I don't fully understand. In fact, comments appear to be a lot different in Movable Type 3.2. It looks like I have a lot more reading to do...

-Andy.