Migrations Xen, Wheezy, Postgres and Python3

The last couple of days I have been busy migrating my vserver.

It all started out when I had the glorious idea to upgrade Debian squeeze to wheezy in order to be able to use python2.7. As it turned out that wasn’t as easy as expected. Wheezy requires a kernel of at least 2.6.26. My vserver was running on a host using 2.6.18.

My hoster told me that a kernel upgrade wasn’t possible. I would have to switch to a Xen based virtual machine instead. I glanced at the Xen offering. Better hardware, more features, same price. So why not? Copying some files from A to B can’t be too hard.

As it turns out, such a migration can take quite some time. Especially if you don’t simply copy one-to-one but actually improve change your setup.

So what changed along the way?

• Cleaned up the nginx configuration. The most noticeable change is that the blog now redirects to https.
• It’s running on python2.7 python3.2.
• Everything runs on postgres instead of mysql. Not that mysql isn’t good enough. But I want to get some experience with postgres.
• Postfix runs together with dovecot instead of courier. Damn, configuring that thing can be hard, especially if you read the wrong documentation.
• The whole setup is a little bit more secure.
• Piwik is gone as it doesn’t support postgres (yet).

I still have some more things to move. But most of the work is done. In the next couple of days I might pick up some of the pitfalls I run into and write about them.