[Sysadmin] Server upgrade

[David Kaufman]

Hi William,

"William Anderson" <neuro at well.com> wrote:
>
> David Kaufman wrote:
>> 2. I saw a chance to upgrade our operating system from Debian 3 to 4
>>    (sarge to etch), putting us within reach of the MySQL 5 and PHP5
>>    upgrades people have been hoping for recently (required by the latest
>>    and greatest Drupal and MediaWiki versions), and
>
> ugh

What do you ugh?  The new PHP, Drupal or MediaWiki?  (can't be MySQL, could 
it?)

> Hmm, but there was no immediate rush, and I'd have loved to talk a bit
> about requirements and long term viability before we splurged.  I'm not
> trying to knock a welcome push towards fast action over bureaucracy, but
> there's fast and then there's hasty :)

I am feeling some pangs of buyer's remorse, now.  When I pulled the 
trigger, I guess I rationalized it in my mind as "just replacing the server 
with a less expensive one", saving evolt a few bucks a month and getting a 
much-needed O/S upgrade in the process. But after reading your next 
paragraph:

> To me, ubuntu hardy made a lot more sense (LTS release, 7 years of
> updates guaranteed) than etch did (lenny will be out in a month or two,
> we'll be stuck back to running oldstable, and our updates will stop
> again in a year or two).

That surprised me!  I know Ubuntu has become incredibly popular, but I 
haven't used it personally (or professionally) and I had always thought of 
it as a *desktop* distro, filled with big bloated GUI, gnomey and KDE-ey 
apps.  I didn't know that Canonical had made a server variant.  Now that 
I'm looking into it, it sure does seem like a nice choice, though.

And in hindsight my decision is seeming less and less prudent, and more 
"impulsive".  ack.

> I mean, thanks David, thanks for actually doing something, which is
> awesome and should be commended, I guess I'm just being a bit grumpy 
> today.
>
> -n

Thanks for the thanks, I guess I just wanted to buy a server today :-)

I'm looking into how hard it would be to un-make my decision.

-dave