I still haven't moved the e-mail server from my DSL line to the VPS in Dallas. That calls for a weekend more or less dedicated to the project, what with the need to shut down the existing server, bring up the new one, move all the archives over, and test everything, all while not trying to conduct business.
This weekend is probably not good, because Reasons. But next weekend - aha! - is a four-day weekend. Excellent! I can plan around getting the task accomplished Saturday and Sunday, with Monday as a buffer and Tuesday as time to put things back as they were, should all else fail.
Yeah, the mail and web functions do need to be separated from the IP address of this here DSL connection before I go moving and losing that address. I already moved the Subversion server over, but the web server gets complicated (some of my cool stuff on Gumbyware Classic depends on a rather outdated version of PHP, what with having been written about 15 years ago), and the mail server has some quirks in its configuration, most of which can probably be dropped at this point, but I need to be certain. (Also, some of the existing configuration is tied into things I set out to do with LDAP, back in the day, and I have no intention of dragging the LDAP folly into the new configuration.)
Update: It's just come to my attention that Debian 9 (stretch) is out. So maybe this weekend is a good time to dist-upgrade the VPS (and some of the physical machines at home, too). Better to do that before migrating the mail service.
Update 2: I did the dist-upgrade on the lab machine, and I Am Not Impressed; the latest KDE appears to have a generous dose of Lose (settings program not reachable from the menu without some editing, and doesn't appear to work when invoked as root; no apparent way to put the launcher in classic mode, and modern mode is painfully cumbersome; my old customizations appear to have been entirely lost; and this is all just in the first little while of trying to use it). Also, x11vnc no longer works the way it used to, and it's not clear that it's even usable - I figured out how to make it run and accept connections using the GUI mode, but it'll randomly disconnect and need to be restarted from the local console, which makes it decidedly less than useful.
Guess I'll upgrade the VPS over the weekend anyway, but anything with a GUI (workstation, laptop) will have to wait a while.
Also, I haven't yet confirmed that some things I sometimes need to run on the lab machine will still run. If they don't... well, I know they still work on the laptop, so I guess that can be used as a temporary measure.
Update 3: I seem to have found the right incantation for x11vnc... maybe. Have to see if it crashes eventually. The Start menu can be put back the way it belongs; right-click on the icon and select Alternatives.
Update 4: Oh, great. Looks like the latest version of NFS doesn't work with the version that's running on the aging server. So, unless I come up with a fix for this, definitely no upgrading of workstation nor laptop until after the move (at which point I'll be setting up a new file server with current software). This seems to have turned up first back in 2015, with much discussion of whether there should even be a fix for legacy support.
...But, with a bit of tinkering, I find that forcing the NFS protocol (on the client side) to 4.0 changes the error message, and forcing it to 3.0 makes things work. Ergo, behold /etc/nfsmount.conf on the newly upgraded box:
[ Server "vetinari" ]
nfsvers=3.0
Oh, and I tried running one of my sometimes-mission-critical Ruby scripts. Seems to be OK, aside from a bunch of warnings about GdkPixbuf::Pixbuf.new(path) being deprecated.
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