I upgraded my server. Phew, it's done.
A quick run-down on the new digs, and the process I went through to get things operational:
- Hardware - the new server is running an AMD X2-6000 CPU with 8 GB of RAM. Should be plenty for the volumes we see here.
- Networking - Networking was a problem. This was because I installed the server to a SATA drive attached to my laptop via a USB connection. (I had the drive, but not the rest of the box yet.) This meant when the drive was moved to it's new home, it was looking to use the MAC address for my laptops Network card as eth0. It took some deep digging to resolve this, but the fix is simple. I'll post about it soon so that I don't forget (again) - it's an important enough trick to warrant it's own post.
- Firewall - I had to redirect my port forwarding rules to the new server. It was a good chance to check through all the rules for old and outdated redirections. For instance, I don't host my mail server anymore, so all the mail ports have now been turned off.
- DNS - The old server was running an internal caching DNS server. Once that was turned off, I started seeing some decent delays in doing name lookups. Changing the DHCP settings on the network to not assign the old name server cleaned that up. But even with a correct name resolution configuration I was still seeing the old IP address for this site and a couple of others. It turned out the Firewall had cached the DNS entries. This was fixed by connecting to the IPCop box via command line, and running the following commands:
ps -aux | grep dns kill -s SIGHUP XXXX
Where the XXXX in the second command was the PID (process ID) for the "dnsmasq" service. Cache was cleared.
I'm still seeing a few issues, but nothing toooo major yet. Mostly on my new desktop box. So far though, I'm happy with things. Hopefully it'll stay that way for a while. Mr Murphey (of Murphey's Law) is usually around when this sort of thing takes place. Hopefully I haven't irked him too much.