Some Subtle Changes
I finally got around to making some upgrades and changes I’ve been planning for a while. Since I reached the end of life cycle for Redhat 9.0 and I wasn’t interested in moving to Fedora, I decided this was a good time to move to Debian. Initially I planned to bring up a temporary system while I rebuilt the main server but I decided I might as well just get it over with. So, after I backed up the server I wiped it clean and started from scratch.
The installation was a little tricky since I was using a multiprocessor system with a RAID 1 setup (software). Getting both processors working was simple. I used apt-get to install the SMP kernel and that was it. The RAID was quite a bit more involved and troublesome but I’ll save that “Howto” for another time.
For the most part I’ve built the system using the debian packages. I wanted to use Exim as my SMTP server but I also wanted it to use MySQL to store the configurations for virtual domains and email usernames. Since that wasn’t possible with the Debian Exim package I built it from source by following these instructions. I also built Qpopper from source using the same instructions. The instructions are ok but seemed a little incomplete at parts. Basically I just looked at the Exim and Qpopper configuration files (included at the end of the instructions), commented out the Amavis sections and that was about it. It’s working perfectly.
I also made some changes to my Url’s. I moved my weblog from http://www.daylate.com/blog/ to http://www.daylate.com/. So basically that URL is for my blog. I also have another URL, http://www.jwholmes.com where I moved my picture gallery and such. The best thing is, all the old links work, thanks to mod_rewrite.
So, if you’ve noticed the site has been down a little bit in the past week, this is why. Now that I’ve worked through all the kernel issues it should be up and running for a long time (I hope, knock on wood). Debian really is cool, by the way.