The server that vended this page to you is sitting in the basement in our office, next to a stack of CDs and the printer and there’s usually a stack of unfiled bills sitting on top of it. It’s currently running ubuntu 8.04 LTS which means its running an OS that hasn’t had software updates since april of 2008 and for which official support ended in May of last year.

I’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade this thing to the soon to be released ubuntu 12.04 LTS which means upgrading through 8 versions of ubuntu. I’m tempted to say that I’m never going to upgrade it but I’m going to do it anyway.

1. printing from the 2 macbooks in the house doesn’t work right. I don’t know exactly why, the formatting comes out wrong but I’m betting that upgrading up the 3 versions of cups that I’ve missed can’t hurt and will at least put me in a better position for debugging.
2. not upgrading means I’ll never get another security update. Probably not crucial in our situation but certainly a consideration.
3. I’m tired of this computer getting more and more ghetto because I use application software from 2008.

This is a terrifying prospect and I’m very badly frightened by it even though I think it has to be done. This server is responsible for

• all our photos. Storage and backup.
• my entire music collection. Storage, tools for ripping cds and streaming to my stereo.
• sending and receiving email to doylepark.net
• Serving the blog you’re reading.
• Serving doylepark.net/photos

Over the years I’ve played with the configuration of all these things many times and I’ve rarely noted what it was that I did. Plus, god only knows what complications will come up when I upgrade the blog and photo gallery software and whether my software raid will survive the migration to the newer OS. I’m going to give it my best shot though. Within the next two to three weeks, doylepark.net is going to go dark and within a week or so it’s going to come back either way. Either it’ll be back in its new and near-term future proof new configuration or all the resources here will become redirects to gmail, picasa and wordpress.com. Wish me luck.