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Software

This site has been build with a nice product called Nanoc. This is a Ruby package, designed to help build static websites (although part of the content may be dynamically generated, the final content is static).

I discovered and started using it after my main server, running another Ruby-based CMS based on Ruby on Rails had its power supply die.

Several things happened during that forced migration:

  1. I moved the main site to nginx instead of Apache as web server. Nginx is much lighter and faster than Apache and I do not use advanced features in Apache that may not be in Nginx.

  2. I stopped using RadiantCMS as my main CMS to move to Nanoc. Again, I liked RadiantCMS but I do not need most of its features and running a full-fledged Rails application just for some pages is too much.

  3. My old website was running at home behind an ADSL connection (6 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up) so I replaced it by my other FreeBSD machine hosted by the Online hosting company.

Of course, I had to move over my DNS, IMAP and SMTP server as well but that was rather easy, most of it was already installed.

I used the opportunity to move my DNS server over to Bind 9.9 which makes it very easy to move your domain(s) to DNSSec. I also upgraded my IMAP server Dovecot to version 2.

Hardware

The machine hosting this, my blog and a couple of other things (like a friend’s site — Terre Seconde) has been moved over to a more comfortable Dedibox dedicated server hosted by Online.net. FreeBSD 9.2 at the moment (to be moved to 11 soonish), full ZFS-on-root of course. Everything is done in jails too.

It used to be an oldish Dell 2950 1U server hosted by the Free Foundation, with a couple of Pentium3 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. This is now a 64-bit machine hosted by Online with 2 4 TB disks, all encrypted and with ZFS.