I’ve had an on/off outage for most of the past 4 days, so to avoid hassles I put the site into maintenance mode.

I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.

The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:

Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres

Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.

Let me know how the site performs on the VM.