Rebirth

Now that my box (Taurus) was home, I needed to begin the process of backing up its data and re-installing Linux. My first instinct was to install Gentoo, after hearing so many good things about it. To this end, I downloaded the i686 ISO of Gentoo to a CD and booted off of it. From the prompt, I mounted my partitions (hda1, hda2, hda3) to temporary directories and started to tar/gz my important data. After the information was bundled, I simply scp’d the files to my OSX laptop.

With my data safely squirreled away, I was ready to wipe Taurus and start anew. However, about 20 minutes into the Gentoo installation process, I realized that Gentoo wasn’t going to work for me. There simply is no single way (or document) to install Gentoo. This is fine for hyper-geeks who want to tune their kernel, but no good for me. So, I fell back on the latest testing version of Debian (Sargent) and went to work.

BAM! 30 minutes later (mostly spent waiting), I had a repartitioned, reformatted machine with a sparkling new Linux distro on it. A few “apt-get install” invokations later and I had Apache, Apache-ssl, MySQL, PHP, Exim and Mailman installed.

I copied over my Tomcat and Java 1.4 backups, along with the blog.war webapp that powers this site. I reloaded as much of my data (MySQL tables, mailing lists, etc) that I could. Once I felt that everything was working, I drove out to Tyson’s at re-inserted Taurus (along with another rebuilt machine, Rome) into the hosting facility. I plugged it in, flipped it on, ran some tests, and walked away. Let’s hope things stay up (and un-hacked) longer this time. :)