As previously wished, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, with as much classical music listening pleasure as I'm expecting it to bring me! 🙂
Just a heads-up, however: things will shortly be happening to this website
In an ideal world, you'd never notice any of the changes happening or making any difference to anything... but this isn't an ideal world and, in particular, I am not a total genius on the web hosting side of things! So, in practice, if you happen to visit at an inopportune moment, you will see the website down, in maintenance mode, not looking entirely healthy, or with large bits and pieces of it missing 🙁 Normal service ought to be resumed by around January 7th and the outages and weirdness will be somewhat intermittent, even up to that point. Expect the music statistics, graphs and associated paraphernalia to be a bit bonkers for a while, too.
The reason for this mayhem? Well, just before Christmas, I was lucky enough to nab this off Ebay:
It's an ASUS RS100-E10-P12 server. It's my first PC or server that has ever breached the 4GHz barrier and dates from about 2019, making it around 7 years younger than the server which currently runs this site. I've slapped TrueNAS 13 on it and the plan is to have it run my media server, host my music and video files and run this website.
The migration of an https website off a very much Linux Ubuntu Server to a new FreeBSD system running in a "jail" (a sort of hybrid virtual machine/container technology) under TrueNAS -and getting Apache and PHP and MySQL working correctly in doing so- is the bit where all the fun happens!
But work it will, eventually -and, at that point, three existing servers (including this site's host) will be coming off-line and being replaced by the ASUS.
So this is really just a bit of a heads-up: expect intermittent disruption until, miraculously, things work as intended once more. My migrations tend to be like that!