Virtualization, and Flakiness

Some of you might have noticed odd behavior with the supermegaultragroovy.com domain lately. If you've been reading this site long enough, you'll know that I must be tinkering with the server again!

I'm trying to reorganize the way I serve the site and clean up my server management tasks a little bit, and I'm planning a move to a Dell PowerEdge 1900 soon. I wish I could say I got an xserve, but they're far too expensive — more than 2x what I paid for the PowerEdge 1900— and I'm not sure I could really deal with learning Mac OS X server on top of all the other stuff involved in the move.

Part of the idea was to move the server tasks off to a set of virtualized servers. This was something I could start doing while I wait for the new hardware to arrive, and all I would have to do is copy the server over to the physical machine once it's up and running. This is a great idea, in theory, but so far this setup has taken the host server offline twice over the weekend.

Since I was using VMWare Server to achieve my goal, and my host hardware crapped out on me twice, I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at xen as an alternative. In doing this, I made the fatal mistake of using debian's apt-get to grab all the packages I needed (because some other things needed upgrading, I just did an apt-get upgrade). In doing this, debian thoughtfully upgraded my php install to php5.2, which FogBugz doesn't support.

This is not the first time that debian bit me like this. I had some trouble earlier because I required python 2.4 for a web application project I was working on using TurboGears, and debian was stuck on 2.3 still. I vowed to switch distributions once I got some new hardware, and I have my sights set on ubuntu in the meantime.

So, to make a long story short, you can expect the site to be a little shaky for a bit as I move to new hardware. I hope to have things operating as they did before ASAP, and I don't plan to do anything to disrupt the existing hardware until I get the new box.