Wednesday, September 17th, 2025

A brief downtime and what caused it
===================================

As you may have noticed, my Gopher server was offline for a couple of
days.  This was caused by me,  moving all  the content  from an Intel 
Atom-based dedicated server in the OVH datacenter in France to an AMD
EPYC-based VPS here in Czechia.

I did the exact opposite  move in March 2019,  and running everything
from a dedicated server was a great experience.  That server had only
two reboots during  all that time and is now approaching 2225 days of
uptime. It may sound strange,  but that was one of the reasons for me
to move away from it.

In 2019, the server was installed from an OVH-supplied Slackware 14.0
image, which was later updated to 14.1.  Even six years ago, that was
already quite an old system, as it had been released in 2013. 

Over time, I updated various components,  libraries, and applications
with versions from Slackware 14.2,  -current,  and 15.0 – all without 
a restart.  After that the server ended up in a state where different
applications required conflicting versions of the same library, and I
somehow managed to make them run. If a restart was ever required, the
machine would probably never boot again.

$ lscpu
Architecture:           x86_64
  CPU op-mode(s):       32-bit, 64-bit
  Address sizes:        36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
  Byte Order:           Little Endian
CPU(s):                 4
  On-line CPU(s) list:  0-3
Vendor ID:              GenuineIntel
  Model name:           Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N2800   @ 1.86GHz
    CPU family:         6
    Model:              54
    Thread(s) per core: 2
    Core(s) per socket: 2
    Socket(s):          1
    Stepping:           1
    CPU max MHz:        1862.0000
    CPU min MHz:        798.0000
    BogoMIPS:           3733.60

logout@nice:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        2020776 kB
MemFree:          115796 kB
MemAvailable:    1429436 kB

$ uptime
 22:56:17 up 2224 days, 11:21
 

Another  reason was  that the hardware  couldn't  cope with WordPress
based  websites anymore.  It could run one WP instance,  but I had to
move two other  sites to a different  web hosting  and pay  for  them
separately.

So I decided  to pull the plug  after  about  a year  of reviewing my
options.  This  new  server  is hosted  on  container  virtualization
infrastructure and is faster and better in every thinkable parameter,
even though I am no longer master of my own restarts.

I had some problems with the Motsognir Gopher server I had been using
on the old machine and wanted to also run on the new one. I contacted
the author, and after he sent me a version with some changes, 
everything works.

So my Gopher server is back, as well as the Bongusta! aggregator, and
I certainly hope that it will stay this way for many years to come.
.