Before the summer holiday ends and people start hammering my download servers again, I am going to that which I announced a while ago. In order to deal with increasing load on my main server I have been planning a re-distribution of its services to multiple new hosts.
The most important one – docs.slackware.com – was moved on June 17th. But the main package mirror and the git repositories still reside on the old host.
Therefore, tomorrow 14 August I am going to migrate the remaining services from old host “martin’ to new host “vance” which is more powerful.
Specifically, the services that will migrate are:
- slackware.nl
- git.slackware.nl
- download.liveslak.org
- git.liveslak.org
- the slakfinder database which is currently hosted at slackware.nl/slakfinder will then also become available as slakfinder.slackware.nl
Expect some downtime while the hostnames move to their new IP address. I have a 10 minute TTL configured in DNS for the current DNS mappings. But I have noticed with earlier migrations that the propagation of my DNS changes across the globe sometimes take *much* longer than 10 minutes. The Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) is usually pretty fast picking up those changes but Google DNS (8.8.8.8) sometimes takes an hour.
I also need to validate that I actually migrated all of the content and configuration properly.
If you wanted to use tomorrow, August 14th, as a perfect day to upgrade your Slackware computer or download a Live ISO from slackware.nl – wait another day please or use another mirror this once.
I understand this is an inconvenience but the service will improve! I expect more bandwidth, faster response time and no more aborted transfers.
Cheers, Eric
Final report-out 2025-aug-15:
The new server is up and running and there are no remaining issues to be resolved as far as I can see.
The migration to the new server also meant an upgrade from Slackware64 15.0 to -current. That caused a few unforeseen issues:
- Segfaults in the ‘cgit’ web interface to my git repositories (as evidenced in ‘dmesg’ output) which turned out to be caused by a race condition in Lua version incompatibilities: cgit was compiled against luajit which is compatible with Lua 5.1, whereas lua-md5 which is used by cgit was compiled against the Slackware lua package (version 5.4).
Resolved by recompiling cgit against Lua 5.4.- Crashes in the slakfinder database updater. The PHP and MariaDB on Slackware 15.0 were fine with ISO-8859 text inside slack-desc files, but on -current that throws an exception.
Resolved by converting all imported text from slack-desc files to UTF-8 first.
Thanks for the heads-up, Eric
Thanks for the heads up!
Typo: I am going to DO that ?
Yes 😉
Migration is over (already for about six hours) and I am only left to fight with the cgit web interface to my git repositories (git.slackware.nl and git.liveslak.org). I have no clue as to what I forgot to migrate or configure.
Let me know if you miss anything.
Hello Eric,
bear.alienbase.nl you have just dropped it? it’s still not resolving anymore.
The propagation of the new IP takes a bit longer for some ISPs but I assume it works now.
I also updated the httpd configuration, now bear.alienbase.nl shows the same content as slackware.nl .
Yes now it works, thanks.
Had to take out “/mirrors/” from the urls.
I have changed the webroot for bear.alienbase.nl so that https://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/ works again.
About ” The PHP and MariaDB on Slackware 15.0 were fine with ISO-8859 text inside slack-desc files,”, apparently MariaDB 11.8.x changed the default collation from latin1 to utf8mb4.
Unfortunately Patrick didn’t notice or post an advice when he added it to -current. I discovered it by chance and had to manually force the collation back to latin1 inside some php stuff of mine.
A host named Vance? Now that sounds ominous…
Nah. For years i have been naming my servers after Science Fiction authors: baxter, bear, bester, brin, brown, corey, hogan, martin, scalzi, vance. Taper has always been an outlier.