Gentoo No More
Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Sun 23 May 2010. Tags: canonical, servers, ubuntu,
Today I finally swapped my last Gentoo server for an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. Gentoo has served me well over these many years, but with my emerge updates growing to several pages (meaning, I was waaaay behind on updates with almost no hope of catching up) it was long past time to switch. I'd moved my internal server over to Ubuntu during the Karmic cycle, but that was a much easier switch. This one was tougher because I had several interdependent externally facing services: web, mail, sftp, and Mailman.
The real trick to making this go smoothly was to set up a virtual machine in which to install, configure and progressively deploy the new services. My primary desktop machine is a honkin' big i7-920 quad-core Dell with 12GB of RAM, so it's perfectly suited for running lots of VMs. In fact, I have several Ubuntu, Debian and even Windows VMs that I use during my normal development of Ubuntu and Python. However, once I had the new server ready to go, I wanted to be able to quickly swap it into the real hardware. So I purchased a 160GB IDE drive (since the h/w it was going into was too old to support SATA, but still perfectly good for a simple Linux server!) and a USB drive enclosure. I dropped the new disk into the enclosure, mounted it on the Ubuntu desktop and created a virtual machine using the USB drive as its virtio storage.
It was then a pretty simple matter of installing Ubuntu 10.04 on this USB drive-backed VM, giving the VM an IP address on my local network, and installing all the services I wanted. I could even register the VM with Landscape to easily keep it up-to-date as I took my sweet time …