Editing 2024 Server Migration

This page is to collect information about our current configuration and options for switching to a new server going forward, since CentOS 7 goes end-of-life at 2024-06-30.  Please feel free to edit to add missing information or correct errors.

== Server selection ==

[https://www.linode.com/pricing?r=30335eb136f2c5f7fa3429dce9f15bea836f81d3 Linode] has been acquired by Akamai and raised their prices.  Could potentially downgrade from the $12/mo (2GB RAM) plan to the $5 (1GB RAM "Nanode") plan depending on distro system requirements.  Could also consider dropping or using different paid backup service.

Other VPS providers can be considered, not sure if they are any cheaper/better.

=== Cloud Plans ===
Looking at 1GB and 2GB plans.
{| class="wikitable"
! Vendor !! Plan !! $/Mo !! Memory !! CPU !! Storage !! Transfer
|-
| Linode || Nanode 1GB || $5 || 1GB || 1 || 25GB || 1TB
|-
| Linode || Linode 2GB || $12 || 2GB || 1 || 50GB || 2TB
|-
| DigitalOcean || 1GiB || $6 || 1GiB || 1 || 25GiB || 1TB
|-
| DigitalOcean || 2GiB || $12 || 2GiB || 1 || 50GiB || 2TB
|-
| Hostwinds || || $4.99 || 1GB || 1 || 30GB || 1TB
|-
| Hostwinds || || $9.90 || 2GB || 1 || 50GB || 2TB
|-
| Vultr || || $5 || 1GB || 1 || 25GB || 1TB
|-
| Vultr || || $10 || 2GB || 1 || 55GB || 2TB
|}
All services seem to be similar, with price differences only by a dollar or two.

== OS selection ==

CentOS Linux is dead.  CentOS Stream is only viable as long as Red Hat/IBM has a business case for it.  Can consider other options like pure Debian or Ubuntu LTS.

=== Service enumeration ===

Services that are currently running on the WPLUG Linode server.  These should include things that are user-facing only, not infrastructure.

* E-mail (Postfix)
* Mailing lists (Mailman)
* Wiki (MediaWiki)
* Monkeybot IRC bot (infobot)
** While one of the oldest WPLUG services, since [[IRC|freenode]] is essentially dead, there may not be good reason to keep it alive.
* Ticketing system (Trac)
** This is [https://trac.wplug.org/wplug-internet/report/6 virtually unused], likely not worth deploying.

Infrastructure software which supports the services above.

* Web server (Apache) - it would be possible to use Nginx instead, but I (Vance) am not familiar with setting it up
* PHP (Apache mod_php) for MediaWiki - could be replaced with PHP-FPM
* Let's Encrypt for TLS certificate (certbot)
* Python for Mailman, Let's Encrypt, and Trac
* Perl for Monkeybot
* MariaDB for MediaWiki - may be [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility#Database possible] to use SQLite or PostgreSQL instead
* Greylisting daemon (Postgrey)
* Fail2ban

=== Support lifetime ===

* CentOS Stream 9 - [https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life_Cycle_Dates 2027-05-31] (limited to RHEL Full Support lifetime)
* Rocky Linux 9 - [https://wiki.rockylinux.org/rocky/version/ 2032-05-31]
* AlmaLinux 9 - [https://wiki.almalinux.org/release-notes/#almalinux-9 2032-05-31]
* Debian 12 "bookworm" - [https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610.en.html 2028-06-10 or later]
* Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)#Releases 2027-04]

=== System requirements ===
{| border="1"
!
!CPU
!RAM
!Disk
|-
|[https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html-single/performing_a_standard_rhel_9_installation/index#system-requirements-reference_installing-RHEL CentOS] / Rocky / Alma 9
|amd64, arm64, ppc64el
|1.5 GB
|10 GB
|-
|[https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch03s04.en.html Debian 12]
|amd64, arm64, i386 (686 or higher), ppc64el, mipsel, mips64el
|512 MB
|4 GB
|-
|[https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/installation Ubuntu 22.04]
|1 GHz amd64, arm64, ppc64el
|1 GB
|2.5 GB
|-
|}

Currently we are using 22 GB of disk, as follows:
 594M    /boot
 35M     /etc
 11G     /home    - monkeybot.log is 7.3GB
 25M     /opt
 2.2G    /root
 4.0K    /srv
 36K     /tmp
 2.1G    /usr
 6.3G    /var

=== Software availability ===

This table is to track, for the different distros under consideration, whether the software we need is available within its repositories.  We want to minimize the number of applications which have to be maintained manually.

Key:
* B: in distro's base repository
* A: in an additional repository provided by the distro
* T: in a third-party repository
* ~: not available in any known repository
* ?: availability unknown

{| border="1"
!
!CentOS / Rocky / Alma 9
!Debian 12
!Ubuntu 22.04
|-
|postfix
|B 3.5.9
|B 3.7.5
|B 3.6.4
|-
|mailman
|~
|B 3.3.8
|A (3) 20200530
|-
|postgrey
|T 1.37<sup>EPEL</sup>
|B 1.37
|A 1.36
|-
|mediawiki
|~
|B 1.39
|A 1.35
|-
|infobot
|~
|~
|~
|-
|trac
|~
|[https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/trac A 1.6] (backports)
|A 1.5.3
|-
|apache
|B 2.4.53
|B 2.4.57
|B 2.4.52
|-
|nginx
|B 1.20.1 / 1.22.1
|B 1.22.1
|B 1.18.0
|-
|php
|B 8.0 / 8.1
|B 8.2
|B 8.1
|-
|php-fpm
|B 8.0 / 8.1
|B 8.2
|A 8.1
|-
|python2
|~
|[https://wiki.debian.org/Python/FAQ#Python_2_support ~]
|A 2.7.18
|-
|python3
|B 3.9.16
|B 3.11.2
|B 3.10.4
|-
|perl5
|B 5.32
|B 5.36
|B 5.34
|-
|mariadb
|B 10.5
|B 10.11
|A 10.6
|-
|mysql
|B 8.0
|~
|B 8.0
|-
|sqlite
|B 3.34
|B 3.40
|B 3.37
|-
|fail2ban
|T 1.0.2<sup>EPEL</sup>
|B 1.0.2
|A 0.11.2
|-
|certbot
|T 2.6.0<sup>EPEL</sup>
|B 2.1.0
|A 1.21.0
|-
|}

Third-party repositories:
* EPEL - [https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/ Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux]

== Nice-to-haves ==

* We have an archive of static web pages from the pre-2007 server "penguin" - it would be nice to make this history available somehow.


[[Category:Migration]]