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Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

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Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#91

Post by h4kunamata »

All my homelab stuff runs on Proxmox LXC container and fully managed via Ansible non-destructive playbooks.

I just setup Semaphore the other night which adds a web UI to manage Ansible playbooks, it works like this:

1. I host my own Forgejo git repos

2. Semaphore is granted access to the Ansible repo

3. FreshRSS notifies me when a service I am running has new release

4. Check the release note, then run Semaphore to run the ansible-playbook

I could fully automate it all but I have the need to read release notes.

As for the OS, they are Debian 13 Netinst and fully local only, I could run them until the services can no longer run, which the ansible-playbook can spin up another LXC container running Debian 14 or whatever.

The goal is to automate everything as much as possible.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#92

Post by foxfired »

Ha! Mine ran on 18.04 [0] and I migrated it a couple months ago. When I went to take a screenshot for bragging rights, I noticed two other servers 16.10 and 15.04

The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine!

[0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#93

Post by mikepurvis »

tracker1 wrote: post #41

Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker... Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data dir…

My home setup is kind of this but it's unraid running the containers and one of them is an nginx thingy specifically designed for reverse proxying other services.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#94

Post by tombert »

nextos wrote: post #53
andix wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

I would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.

I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now.

It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#95

Post by nijave »

kylec wrote: post #27

I, too, have a server running 16.04 that I'm afraid to update. It currently has an uptime of 1281 days... at this point I'd feel bad rebooting it

dd filesystem to another machine then boot it up with an emulator like qemu and do a trial run

Be careful if you have anything that autostarts that reaches out

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#98

Post by someotherperson »

Oh wow. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. The server hadn't been updated since ~2015, running a blog on Ghost from that time with node 0.10 installed.

I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#99

Post by iknowstuff »

nextos wrote: post #53
andix wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

I would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.

Eh nix flakes are a nightmare to configure. Far more verbose than a docker compose. They rely on some caches which keep pre-compiled packages and you better make sure you have the caches with the particular flakes you need set up. Yikes

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#100

Post by elevation »

lnenad wrote: post #3

I love people that aren't afraid to experiment and learn. As someone that hasn't had a formal education in software engineering (just in other kind of engineering) I learned the most by doing and failing.

Formal education doesn't typically emphasize this kind of learning. Univerity CS classes will focus on data structures, algorithms, languages, turing machines and finite automata and how they relate to computability.

If you're a university student and want to learn OpenBSD administration or how to host your own blog, or just how to use VSCode, these are all extracurriculars.

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