Paul A. Luzzi

October 5, 2014

After the whole recent shellshock vulnerability issue, I decided it was finally time to upgrade my web hosts.  I have upgraded (and replatformed) many times over the years :

• I think the first web host I had ever exposed to the outside world from my home network was a RedHat 5.2 whitebox server.  That was way way back – maybe 1996?  I know I had that up and running when I started a job in Jan 1997, so it had to be about ’96.
• After that was a Caldera Linux host – I think it was version 1.1 back then.
• Eventually that got to a Caldera 2.3 host which I liked quite a bit – and was *super* responsive.  To this day, that was still the best performing web host I ever had and it was on 486 hardware if memory serves … maybe a Cyrix or Nexgen 586.
• Due to the need for some other features , I then went to a (gasp) Windows NT 4.0 server, sitting behind WinProxy on a kickin Dual Pentium Pro 200Mhz!   Man that server cost a bundle.
• After that it was a Turbo Linux 4.0 host – which was fun, with its software based load balancing.  That was a tough time and I went through about 3 iterations of the Turbo Linux host due to a rash of bad Seagate drives, and these being white box single drive hosts.  Lessons learned, after that it was better hardware like scsi based whiteboxes with multiple drives.
• Then when my Turbo Linux 6 host failed, it was easier to update.
• I think I tried a Solaris 2.6 intel in there … if memory serves, even a Solaris 8 intel as well (which I know I used for both mail and dns)  but never really cared for that.
• I know I did a lot with virtualization and DL580’s after that, and I’m missing an update after that one (maybe Ubuntu 5.04?) –
• I’m pretty sure that takes us to my “most recent” host which has been Fedora Core 8 for the better part of the last many years and served me quite well.   I’m not a RedHat fan, so it’s surprising I’ve kept it around as long as I have.

These have all been VM based setup for a while now, and has migrated with me over the years across many iterations of hardware and virtualization platforms (xen, vmware, etc).  But after shellshock, my Fedora had finally reached the end of the line – just too hard to patch.

So this weekend, I pulled down the latest LAMP instance from Turnkey Linux (love those), and migrated all my stuff over to the version 13 LAMP stack in about 2 hours.  These “every couple year” migrations have taught me to keep things in consistent locations, single filesystem, using as standard a package set as possible (to be portable across distros), and try not to go banana’s customizing.  That’s what allows these fairly fast migrations.  So now I’m on Debian 7, automatic daily patching for vulnerabilities, denyhosts implemented, and things look good.

Unfortunately, at the same time as all that was going, I lost my HP-dv7-3065dx laptop to a bad drive, lost yet another living room mini switch for my entertainment center (cisco sd208), and my circa 2003 Sony subwoofer is on the fritz now too.  Gotta take the good with the bad I guess.