The Kingdom of Philtopia

I have made a new years goal to retire this server before March, the OS has been upgraded many many times over the years and various software I’ve used has come and gone so there is lots of cruft. This server/VM started in San Fransisco and then my provider stopped offering VMs in CA and moved my VM to the UK which is where it has been ever since. This VM started its life in Jan 2008 and it is time to die.

During my 2 week xmas break I have been updating web facing software as much as I could so that when I do put the bullet in the head of this thing I can transfer my blog, wiki, and a couple other still active sites to the new OS without minimal tweaking in the new home.

So far the biggest issues I ran into were with my mediawiki, that entire site is very old, from around 2006 2 years before I started hosting it for someone and then I inherited it entirely around 2009 so the database is very finicky to upgrade and some of the extensions are no longer maintained. What I ended up doing was setting up a docker instance at home to test upgrading and working through the kinks and I have put together a solid step by step on how to move/upgrade it to latest.

I have also gotten sick of running my own e-mail servers, the spam management, certificates, block lists…..it’s annoying. I found out recently that iCloud which I already have a subscription to allows up to 5 custom e-mail domains so I retired my Philtopia e-mail to it early in December and as of today I moved the vo-wiki domain to it as well. Much less hassle for me, I already work enough for work I don’t need to work at home as well.

The other work continues, site by site but I think I am on track to put an end to this ol server early in the year.