forum.defence-force.org

So, Unbuntu 16.04 is finally out, I have all the required hardware for the server upgrade, I will tentatively try to setup everything during the week-end.

It's a complete machine exchange, so in case of horribly catastrophic failure I can just put back the old machine, but basically except some down time at some point during the week-end.

Good luck! and thanks for maintaining DF for us all!

The machine is now running Ubuntu 16.04, fully upgraded, the fans have been replaced by silent ones so my second half does not scream at me because of the noise

Currently installing SSH, Apache etc...

For the nitty gritty details the current Miniserve machine is a 1.66Ghz Atom D510 with 4 gigs of ram and uses a 40GB Intel X25-V SSD for the system (plus a 750 GB Hard Drive for the website itself).
The new machine uses a 1.80Ghz Celeron 1037U with 16 gigs of ram, and I hope to run everything on a single 120GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

This Intel SSD has been valiantly working without any problem, but technically that was one of the first generation SSD models, and I'd rather not push my luck for too long.

As long as you make backups

Well done !

Well done

I wonder if a Raspberry Pi could be reliable enough to be used as a web server.
It's totally silent, and you can use an sd card to host the server.

i've been using an rPi for just this purpose for a few years now and it does work just like any other web server. Heck, I ran a whole ISP on a system with less oomph than the rPi back in the day .. its just a matter of how much you want to pay attention to it to make sure it stays running.

A PI would be more than enough to run a web server, but with the limited amount of memory and storage, I'm not sure I would rely on that to host my entire infrastructure:
- the phpbb forum (with the mysql database)
- the svn server (and associated file storage)
- all the defence force sub-domains and personal stuff (osdk, blog, wiki, oric library, individual game pages for 1337, im, skooldaze, ...)
- ftp server
- irc bot for the #oric channel history on IRCnet

Then on top you need to add a decent backup system, etc...

Miniserve 1.0 was a VIA Artigo A2000 mini-pc, with a 1.5 GHz VIA C7-D processor: For the ones of you that remember, it was not particularly snappy: The forum was frequently slow, pages updates were slow as well, and even me doing maintenance on my side directly on the machine was frustrated by how slow everything was.

Then when I got problems with Ubuntu starting to fail on it because of driver issues, I gave a shot at a more standard x86 version, which gave us the current Miniserve 2.0, which for my side has been running perfectly fine speed wise.

I'm trying to repeat this previous success with Miniserve 3.0 which is basically a more recent equivalent of the 2.0 hardware.