Brillant post ! I love Hetzner's cloud UI.
Happy customer for many many years with them.
Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
161–170 of 241 posts
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#162The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.
"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime" Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour. However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist. Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss wit…
It's pretty easy to abstract away a proxmox node into a terraform or other type of code based recipe for easy backup / reconstruction / upgrading.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, it there any public info on the case? Not doubting it, only curious about some kind of postmorten.
In Danish: https://danskebank.com/da/news-og-insights/nyhedsarkiv/press... or translated: https://danskebank-com.translate.goog/da/news-og-insights/ny... TLDR: power supply failed completely and DB2 failed running recovery operations due to multiple old/existing software bugs.
Thanks for hunting it down.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are betting that whatever you host doesn't live as long as the upgrade cycle because it'll probably be a pain when the upgrades finally arrive. I'd rather have smaller version jumps more often than a huge jump with everything changing after a long time.
It usually doesn't live until the end of the support cycle. And if it does I will probably migrate it to a fresh VM instead of upgrading the distribution.
Completely agree. A fresh install beats an in-place major version upgrade every time. Less hazardous and gives an easy path to clear out all the accumulated crud.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
some people (myself included) like hosting their own stack for fun or for learning. There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else. I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field. As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again i…
> for learning. That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.
In this framing, learning is always a liability. The real issue is undertaking the liability while not capitalizing on the opportunity it presents.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for learning. That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.
In this framing, learning is always a liability. The real issue is undertaking the liability while not capitalizing on the opportunity it presents.
The “liability” I refer to is that of wilfully, knowingly leaving a system unpatched in order to avoid the learning opportunity of upgrading it.
We're working toward the same goal here, yes.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#167The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.
I hear you. On the other hand, not having to mess with something is good. I just make extensive notes in a README somewhere - usually in KeePass right next to the system info.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#168I, 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
What is there to be afraid of? Don't you have backups? Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
Backups are not going to help if a reboot breaks something.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is something like live patching. One reason mainframes and micros are still around us, is that you can change almost everything between hardware and software without downtime. It is also available in commercial surviving UNIXes, and as paid for feature in some Linux distros, although not to the extent that those grandparent systems are capable of.
A Danish bank found out that this can bite you in the ass. When you hotpatch the system for years then you have no idea if the system can boot up or it will fail somewhere in the booting process. i.e. you can only trust what you regularly test.
Mainframes can LPAR dynamically. When you want to test if your production system will IPL cleanly, you clone your production environment to an isolated LPAR and IPL it. No impact to production and you get your test.
Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.
You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.
You're not wrong, but that doesn't make your argument immediately compelling. It is easy, but so is VPS. People use what they know, and switching cost requires a reason other than "this is also easy"