Administrivia: new web hosting arrangements

Administrivia: new web hosting arrangements

Welcome to the new hosting situation. Over the past month or so, I've been working to move this web page and some of my other stuff to a new spot. As of this morning, it's done, and this is being served from the new machine. Say hello to flicker.rachelbythebay.com.

So, what happened? Well, a cute little company called SoftLayer turned into a massive monster called IBM. They still had acceptable rates and actually offered IPv6 (barely), but their corporate brain damage only got worse every passing year.

They had definite "left hand, right hand" moments, like when I went to turn up a new machine in February 2020 and they didn't offer a kickstart of RHEL 8. It's like, hello, you bought Red Hat six months before. RHEL 8 itself had been out for nearly a year at that point, and indeed, had made it to 8.1 by then. So, I had to do CentOS 8, and then they hosed us all royally that year. That's when I stuck more pins in my IBM voodoo doll and migrated to Rocky.

Then there was the day in January 2022 when I was doing some work on the machine and noticed that it needed a firmware update or something. I figured, okay, fine, I'll take the downtime and let their automatic doodad do exactly that. It's really late and nobody should care. I queued it up and powered it down (per their instructions).

I watched from the remote screen monitor as the automatic updater powered it up and got it to boot over the network into Windows (!) in order to run some nasty thing that popped up CMD windows and worse. I went off to do something else to distract myself. One hour turned into two, then into three, and support started saying "oh, it'll be a total of four hours". Great. The worst part was the complete lack of updates during this process. They just kept flailing.

I finally said "please just abort this and put my machine back up". I told them that it failed, and they should not attempt to troubleshoot their automation system on my machine. They should admit that it failed, put me back up, and leave me alone for a while until I can figure out what happens next. They finally got someone who was paying attention to do exactly this, and the machine went back up.

We scheduled it to happen the next night during another four-hour window. They started it, worked for about an hour, then called it and decided to go with a chassis swap. Yep, they pulled my drive out and jammed it into another box (and I was fine with this). Since I'm not a complete clown, it came back up by itself and figured everything out and kept going. How about that.

So, if you noticed multiple hours of the site being down on January 3rd, 4th and 5th of 2022, that's why!

What else with them? Their customer support is completely boneheaded sometimes. They had this "VPN" thing so you could tunnel into your "privatenet" which has the IPMI/remote KVM interface for your server(s). I would do that when doing a kernel upgrade in case I screwed up and needed to rescue things. I'd get that working *first* before doing the reboot just out of paranoia. I've yet to need it, but old habits die hard.

One day, it just stopped working. I filed a ticket asking them what I should be doing, since their documentation web page (and I provided the URL) said to use X, but X wasn't working. Is there a new hostname, or can you fix the thing?

They came back and said, oh, use this documentation web page.

It was the same page I had put in the request, unchanged.

Several days went by. Finally, I "thanked" them for "providing the same URL that I had provided them in the first place", and closed the ticket with a thumbs-down.

In the meantime, I had managed to find another way in by guessing how their hostname scheme worked, and got my work done and rebooted into the new kernel. They never really fixed the docs as far as I know, and they are probably still pointing people at a long-dead VPN endpoint.

But no, that wasn't it, either. The machine was physically in Texas. That particular hive of hate and villainy is talking about making ISPs restrict access to certain kinds of web pages. That's obviously about consumer-side stuff, but they could probably find ways to extend that to the *hosting* side of it, too. Also, screw them and feeding their tax base. I started looking for replacement options in other locales.

At this point, I noticed that all IBM would sell me was something that was much less box for much more money. I'm talking a slower processor, less memory, and all of that stuff, and the monthly bill would go up. Screw. That.

And then I got my final sign from the universe: they're "modernizing" and so DAL05 (my location) will be shutting down in April 2024. I didn't even notice this until I happened to be in their "portal" to do some unrelated work. Did they mail me? No. Did they call me? No. I just happened to notice it while in there one day.

Well, that's the last sign I needed, and I pulled the trigger on a colocation cabinet a few days later. That then started the whole crazy mess of getting a server, pulling together the network equipment, installing it *physically* (this was hard!), installing it *logically*, and then migrating everything.

Late Friday night into Saturday morning, I started flipping things over and kept an eye on them. A few minutes ago, I turned off the web server on the old machine. I figure if your DNS provider is crazy enough to clamp my 900 second TTL up to something over 12 hours, you deserve to talk to a brick wall of RSTs for a while.

So here we are. I now have a server I can physically lay hands on, albeit with a little driving involved. I got it used, and it's a real beast, but it does work. I'm also hearing from early testers that it's significantly faster for them. I thought it was just because I moved it about 40 milliseconds closer to me, but it just seems snappier for them, too. How about that?

I probably screwed up at least one thing with this migration like I did last time, so if you spot something amiss, please do holler. All of the URLs should still be working and all of that stuff. I already know the mtimes all reset, so a bunch of pages look new when they have the same content - that was unavoidable.

That's the story of one more bird in the flock.