Sorry for the lack of new content on Friday but I chose this weekend for server migration. Back in May I changed my server over to OpenBSD 5.3. Since then I’ve found OpenBSD to be a good server but upgrading it and adding features is a huge pain in the ass. Since I am my own server administrator and I have less free time than I did last year I’ve decided to change my server over the Ubuntu 14.04 Server. Why Ubuntu? Because it’s easy to setup, update, and there are guides for doing anything and everything posted all over the Internet. In other words I’m getting lazier in my old age.
I’m hoping this move will cut down on my maintenance time a bit. When Heartbleed struck I was basically left to compile a new version of Nginx with OpenSSL 1.0.1g in order to patch the vulnerability. The reason for this is because OpenBSD doesn’t offer much in the way of support for older versions of their operating system and if you want to use the patch provided by OpenBSD you have to download the operating system’s source code and compile the patch. That’s more headaches than doing sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. While the OpenBSD method may be better in many regards it’s more time consuming and that’s a tradeoff I can’t afford at the moment.
Anyways there are likely a few bugs I haven’t figured out and fixed yet so bear with me.
Yeah Ubuntu is ridiculously easy to keep up to date it would be nice if other Linux distros would move to the more streamlined updating that Ubuntu has had for many versions.
Anything based on Debian tends to be easy to update thanks to apt-get. I don’t have a lot of experience with Red Hat based distros but I think the yum command accomplished the same things.
At this point it’s pretty difficult to argue in favor of not having an easy to use update mechanism. But there are operating systems out there that don’t believe such mechanism are worth developing and that makes them difficult to use unless you have a boatload of time on your hands.