Server Migration

I mentioned over the weekend that I'd talk a little bit more of my weird server configuration. This post goes out to all the server-nerds out there. Word. I have run Debian for the last few years as my primary Linux distribution. Before that, I bounced around Mandrake, Redhat, and SuSE. I actually first cut my teeth on Slackware a long time ago. Linux sucked real bad back then. I made the common newbie mistake of destroying a Windows partition in the process. Oops! Recently, some colleagues of mine suggested I give Gentoo a shot. I liked to make fun of it, but liked the idea of a bare-bones distribution. Also, I felt like I was compiling almost everything anyway, so why not take the plunge? Well, I like to leave well enough alone, so I wasn't hurrying to replace a perfectly fine server. However, recently when I tried working with some Python 2.4-specific projects, and crashed in the wall that is Debian's slowness to adopt Python 2.4 as the default python installation, I thought it was time to start moving over. With some old hardware I had in the basement, I launched an installation. It was pretty hardcore, but I got through it unscathed. I installed the bare minimum required to get to the same functionality I have in my main server. The first step in the transition involves piping over chunks of web traffic to the Gentoo box. The FuzzMeasure Pro 2 launch site is powered this way right now. Soon, I hope to have all web traffic going through the Gentoo box (kermit is its name, by the way). Slowly but surely, everything will move over to that installation. Once everything's going through kermit, and piggy's basically acting as a firewall, I will take the site down and swap kermit into the hardware that's running piggy right now. This is the plan, anyway — nothing ever works out this easily in practice!