I've long been meaning to install a new operating system and services on my home server, cheshirecat. Mostly it only exists to host my big old RAID that stores ~rjbs, my MP3's, and a few other personal things. It used to host my website, the primary MX for manxome.org, and some other important things, so replacing it was going to be a pain. Still, it was running Slackware 7, dating from 1999, and it had only been patchily upgraded here and there.
Yesterday, I finally decided that I'd give rebuilding it a go.
It was fantastically painless. I downloaded a Debian 4 net install ISO, added a little partition, and did a little floundering around until I got everything working. "Everything" here means, roughly: Samba, Apache 2 with SSL and SVN DAV, software RAID, LVM, and mounting my existing volumes.
I'm sure I'll hit a couple little snags over the next few weeks, but all the important stuff is already taken care of. (Well, I haven't set up djbdns yet.) It's nice to know I can more easily remain up to date now, and worry about more interesting things.
As a side note: I've been using BitTorrent, the original Python console client, version 4. Debian only has version 3, so I decided to take someone's advice and try rTorrent. Wow! It's fantastic. It's just about everything I always wished "launchmany_curses" would be.
