One of those little side projects I’ve been working on in my spare moments for, oh, the last three months is a replacement for the server formerly known as Mihoshi. She’d been in service longer than four years, actually, originally built to be the chat server for KNRK. She took on other duties in time, and with the demise (twice over the course of three years) of the chat room her primary function became that of a file transfer depot and Cacti host.

Problem is, she was getting old and slow. Big (physically, not in terms of capacity) old slow hard drives and a puny old processor were impeding her ability to take on new tasks, and I have a slew of new functions I want to use that box for. So I started prepping Mihoshi’s replacement, known as GXP. (For the record, ever since we lost the ability to use kgon.com for in-building subdomains Mihoshi has been known to the outside world as GXP… but that was just an emergency stopgap name change.)

And because I’m an insane dork who can’t just do things the easy way, I built the new machine around a Linux distribution I’d never seriously tried before: Debian.

I will say this: The apt-get system is the cat’s pajamas. Hell, half of why I tried Debian is because of how much I’ve recently enjoyed using apt-rpm on my Fedora installs. I was able to apt-get everything I needed to make GXP happy, including Cacti itself. Now that’s impressive. For the first time I haven’t felt the need to hand-roll Apache, PHP, MySQL or any of the library dependencies just to satisfy my obscure requirements. Damned nifty, that.

Yesterday it came down to crunch time. Corporate wanted a special new project, and I was the logical guy to implement it… but the machine I wanted to implement it on wasn’t ready yet. So I made it ready and flipped the switch. Oddly enough, almost everything transferred with complete ease. I didn’t drop any data, lose any configurations or piss off anybody who uses that machine for vital business purposes. (This doesn’t count Cacti, which I’d been wanting to reimplement from scratch anyway. And yes, it is working better on the new box.)

I even got to learn how to implement and administer phpBB, which is most assuredly quite the nifty message board system. It has some minor quirks, but generally it’s quite straightforward from the administrative side. Very nice.

Not all eleven-hour workdays are bad, see?