I will be upgrading the server to the latest OS version shortly.
The forum will be down for maintenance in about half an hour.
I hope to finalize all upgrades in under an hour but murphy’s law never sleeps, so don’t be alarmed if it takes a bit longer.
This topic is now a banner. It will appear at the top of every page until it is dismissed by the user.
This topic is no longer a banner. It will no longer appear at the top of every page.
Preliminary upgrades are done and the forum is back online.
Now I will work on cleaning everything up, but there should (hopefully) be no more service outages at this time.
All upgrades and cleanup tasks are now finished.
I have changed a few performance relevant settings on the forum software. I’d appreciate feedback if the responsiveness of this site has changed for anyone.
Thanks!
I was asleep the whole time.
Nice though!
Just wondering, what operating system is the web server running on? 
Let me guess. Debian?
Well it’s a Debian derivative. Upgrading a pure Debian installation would be kind of pointless at this moment, since the new version Debian 8.0 Jessie will be released in exactly one week.
Ubuntu then? The Hype Train is ready for Debian Jessie, its a hell to upgrade my server though. I have to backup all config files and thats not just a few. SystemD is nice though
I’m still not sure about the impact of converting all my Debian servers to using systemd as init process. So what I am probably going to do, is clone my main server to a local VM, do the upgrade there and then see if everything is working.
If you need a nice backup solution, I just released Hactar. It’s a wrapper around rsync to make daily incremental snapshot backups of a server. I also wrote a blog post where I talk a bit about my motivation and how to use Hactar: http://blog.no-panic.at/2015/04/14/my-backup-strategy/
With such a backup in place, it is very easy to restore all configuration and data if you need to.
Nice, I’ll check it out. I’m mostly worried about all the configuration files, as I can’t remember which ones I’ve modified and what I have modified 
etckeeper hooks into package managers and sets /etc under version control.
Might be worth looking into, I’ve used it very successfully in the past.