simon’s blog

The current main FreeBSD web server (www.FreeBSD.org) is not very fast by today’s standards (dual 800MHz) and for years it has been suffering from some hardware issues (bad RAM), causing it to crash from time to time, so it has been due for replacement for some time.

A few month ago the main FreeBSD CVS server (repoman) was replaced with a faster system and “I” got the old server to use as a new www.FreeBSD.org replacement. Even though the old repoman was not quite fast enough to handle the load put on it as a CVS/Perforce server it’s still a dual 2.4GHz Intel XEON with 2GB RAM and SCSI RAID controller, so it should be plenty fast as a web server for some time.

Since the new www.FreeBSD.org, let’s call it nnwww for now, is many thousand KM away from me (it’s in California, USA and I’m in Denmark) I don’t have physical access to the box, only remote serial console access, so reinstalling the box from scratch is a bit troublesome. Instead I’m upgrading the already installed FreeBSD version on nnwww (FreeBSD 4.10) to FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. Upgrading from FreeBSD 4 to something newer can be a bit painful and blow up badly, so I was a bit nervous about doing it, but so far it seems to be going without a hitch. As of this writing the system is happily running FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE (you have to go via FreeBSD 5 when upgrading from 4 -> 6).

So far so good, the real work will start when I’m going to prepare the system to run as www.FreeBSD.org… the current setup on www.FreeBSD.org is rather complex, so I expect it to take some time getting everything up and running.

So, this is one of the tasks I expect a good part of my vacation will be spent on :-). Stay tuned of more updates on the install process.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 0:47 and is filed under Admins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.