debian

New year, new server image

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Last week, I upgraded the server that this site runs on to Debian 13 (also known as Trixie), and the corresponding version of Sympl. This ended up being a fresh installation of Debian; I tried and in-place upgrade and, well, let’s just say it went badly wrong and the virtual machine wouldn’t boot. Whoops.

A sign that I only partially learn from my mistakes is that this is basically what happened when I lost everything in 2018. However, this time I did have backups, thanks to the UpDraft Plus WordPress plugin. And, whilst I didn’t do a backup immediately before the aborted upgrade like I should have done, I did have one that was only about a week out of date. Furthermore, this included some blog posts that were written but not yet published at the time, so I didn’t even lose those. Phew.

The upgrade to Debian 13 means that I’m running a newer version of PHP. Debian 12 ships with PHP 8.2 and I had added a custom repository to upgrade this to PHP 8.3. Debian 13 includes PHP 8.4, and so I no longer get a warning message in WordPress’ Site Health checker. It’s not the latest version – that’s PHP 8.5 – but it’s newer.

The existing server image had been in place for just over a year, when I moved from Bytemark to Hosting UK, and the last time I upgraded Debian was in 2023. Doing a fresh install every now and again should help to keep things running better, hopefully.

Hopefully, you won’t notice anything different about the blog, apart from some of the sidebar widgets missing. I’ll get these restored in time.

Hello from a new host

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Screenshot of the home page of the HostingUK web site

As of Monday, I’m hosting this blog with a new hosting company: HostingUK. Previously, I’ve been with Bytemark, having migrated there almost 15 years ago. And, for almost ten years, this blog has been on Bytemark’s BigV platform.

Bytemark announced that its BigV platform was being retired, as it’s reaching the end of its operational life, and offered to transfer me to HostingUK. They’re both now owned by the same parent company, IOMart. Price-wise, I’m still paying the same amount per month for a very similar package as before.

Hopefully, you won’t have noticed any issues with the changeover. It seemed to go really smoothly from my end – I’ve had far more issues in the past, but then I was significantly more prepared this time

On the new host, I’ve built a new virtual machine, rather than simply copying the entire image over. It’s still based on Debian Linux, with Sympl providing the hosting environment. Sympl, incidentally, is forked from Bytemark’s own Symbiosis project which is no longer in development.

I then copied over the data from the old image to the new one – both the data files and a dump of the MariaDB database. Then all I had to do was wait for the DNS to switch over. Indeed, it felt like an anti-climax – apart from renewing some login tokens and some DNS tweaks, I’ve not needed to do much tinkering following the switchover.

Up and running again!

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At last, the move to the new host is complete!

I’m now hosting with Bytemark, a well-known hosting company based in York with data centres in Manchester and London. The domain is managed by 123-Reg – I’ve decided to keep the domain and hosting separate to make any future host changes easier.

The hosting package is quite different to the package I had previously. Whereas before I had a simple virtual host setup with FTP, email and databases, this package offers SSH access to a complete virtual machine running Debian. In other words, I can configure everything on the server essentially as I wish – even changing to a different Linux distro if I wanted to.

I’ll be sticking with Debian for now. It brings with it Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5, and I have the ability to add things like FastCGI should I wish to at a later date. I’ve also been able to install every optional Perl module that Movable Type can use, including ones like Image::Magick and XML::Parser which require compiled code.
I’m still using Movable Type 4.3x for now – it’s still supported, with version 4.34 having come out a few days ago, and having tried MT5 for a bit I think it’s a bit overkill for what I need it for.

The move to the new host wasn’t quite as smooth as I’d hoped – some issues with having the domain released from the old host, for example, and the new machine that the site runs on had a disk failure last night, literally about 30 minutes after I updated the DNS to point to the new server. It’s also taken some time to get used to configuring the server myself, rather than having a fancy-pants admin interface to do it for me. Suffice to say I’ve learnt a lot about the Unix command line over the past couple of weeks.

Hopefully now everything will work, but give me a heads-up if it doesn’t!