Soooooo I migrated servers over the last few days. I got me a fairly inexpensive box, threw Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on it, and migrated all of my assets over to it. There should not have been any down time, the actual switch over should have taken about 2 seconds even though the process ended up taking about 16 hours longer than I thought it would. Why did I do this? a few reasons:

1) Experience! I am always trying to tinker in new ways on my Linux system(s)/networks. I enjoy the growth of knowledge in gaining experience, and it's pretty darn satisfying in the end! I have never migrated servers, so that was interesting, and also I wanted more experience with a headless installation (I was hosting on my desktop machine before).

2) An excuse to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. It was recently released, and now I have at least one instance of it running. I wanted to be able to install it to my desktop as well, but while it was hosting my site, I could not do that; now I can.

3) The ability to tinker on my desktop hardware. Now I can tinker away with some noise-reduction techniques I have been reading about, I can do things like reboot without killing my hosted site/services. This also means I plan on doing some Drupal testing/module porting and getting my name active in the drupal community, yippie!

4) Share the load! Yes, now my desktop is just a tiny bit less stressed out. That's a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

Performance note: there seems to be some issue with my new Gallery2 installation, please be patient while I iron out some bugs.

So in keeping with the spirit of documentation, and documenting everything major I do here, I'll be posting my notes. The series of steps I took will be posted in one or more posts detailing the harrowing journey.