Well, I got fed up with my zombie-of-an-Ubuntu install. It was installed as Xubuntu 6.10, then upgraded to 7.04. Messy. So, I had some free time today and installed Debian GNU/Linux on it! I love Debian! Aside from some weirdness with not being able to install apache2, that was fixed by adding the line
deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian etch main contrib
to my /etc/apt/sources.list
Then it found apache2, and for some reason then wanted the CD to install it from. Weirdness. Oh well, it’s over now. That’s not the best of it – the server now has a startup time (from when I press the power button to when the cursor is blinking for me to login) of a bit under 36 seconds! That’s not to mention the shutdown time of around 5 seconds. For those of you who need help grasping how awesome this is, it means a complete hardware reboot can be accomplished in 40 seconds!
There is no data loss, all MySQL was backed up. The only loss I can think of is the changelog for cs_generic, but I could make it again by looking through all the files and seeing the changes if I wanted to.
I also created a startup script for Ventrilo, meaning everything I need is now started completely automatically. I used somewhat the help file here, and also found some syntax by Googling directly for Ventrilo startup scripts, but ended up writing my own. As much as it’s possible, it’s not all that long. I found it useful to try to do stuff just with sudo /etc/init.d/vent {command,} just for debugging the scripts. My initial (and only?) problem turned out to be that I had an underscore instead of a slash in my file path. It couldn’t find /home/steve/vent_ventrilo_srv so well, but /home/steve/vent/ventrilo_srv was fine. Wonder why. 😛
Anyways, aside from the usual urges to elope with SSH, the server install went flawlessly. Maybe I can publish a guide. That’s a summer-type thing though.
Should definately publish your Ventrilo startup guide… we’ve got it all pretty automated (for hundreds and thousands of servers), but I’m always looking to see what other users are doing of course 🙂 Granted, we don’t use debian on our Ventrilo machines — but I use Edgy eft on my desktop — though the general stuff is pretty much the same with what we use.
Oh, I meant a guide on setting up a Debian server, but I guess that’s been done. Will do… I use Ubuntu Feisty on my desktop, and use Wine to run games when I don’t feel like rebooting into Windows.