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My server, which is among other things hosting this weblog, is a dedicated server originally hosted by the German webhoster webperoni. It was a bargain at that time, and still a good price, and I was satisfied with webperoni’s performance and reliability. Unfortunately, they were taken over by another web hosting company, best known for their server4you brand. They moved my server to a different data center and continued to run it there. Unfortunately, server4you was less reliable and less flexible than my original hoster: For example, when one sector on the hard drive turned bad, they were not able to put in a new drive in my system, let me mirror the content, and then remove the old drive. In another, even worse, instance, my second IP address, which I bought from webperoni, was given to another customer. When I finally noticed and complained, they refunded me the charges that I paid for the IP. But understandably, I wanted to get away from that hoster.

The contract is automatically prolonged for one year if not canceled in time, and I missed the deadline last year. This year, I finally got around to rent a slightly better and slightly more expensive server from Hetzner, which whom I already made good experience. I would have preferred to switch when I am back from India, but server4you would not even let me prolong the contract by just two months – only a whole year or nothing. So they got nothing, and I started to work on the move yesterday.

At first I set off installing the new system from scratch, setting up all the various services and copying over data and configuration. But quickly, I gave up and moved the system by completely by copying programs, configuration and data from the old server.

The new system has its root partition on a LVM share on software RAID, and now uses grub2 to boot. I had a hard time to get it booting, and a hard time to debug the issues without access to the physical console. I finally understood the problem by running kvm -hda /dev/sda -hdb /dev/sdb -curses from the recovery system and observing that the initial ramdisk is having problems finding the root partition. The problem was that I thought addressing partitions via file system labels is the way to go now and manually added root=LABEL=root to the Linux command line in /etc/default/grub. But then the initial ramdisk would not activate the logical volume. If I had just left it to the grub package, which inserted root=/dev/mapper/vg-root, everything would work fine.

The new IP address (88.198.48.143) has not propagated throughout the Internet yet. Running the following command for a variety of ports on the old machine (80.86.81.20) makes sure nobody notices:

port=443
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --dst 88.198.48.143 --dport $port -j SNAT --to-source 80.86.81.20
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dst 80.86.81.20 --dport $port -j DNAT --to-destination 88.198.48.143:$port

The only question remaining is: What to do with the old server for the remaining six weeks? I am considering to erase the system, set up a plain Debian system and run a tor/freenet/whatelse node at full speed.