LXF’s new $HOME

Jonni Bidwell has one month to save Linux Format’s web presence. He claims he didn’t sign* up for this, but Fate takes a different view…

So there was us happily thinking things were getting back to normal, enjoying a beer on the terrace that latterly had become our base of Friday operations. We sipped our ales and couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment. In spite of adverse circumstances, in particular the closure of the LXF Towers deli, we had kept making the magazine and soon things would be back to normal. And then, the phone rang. It was UKFast. To what did we owe this pleasure?

Well, says they, “we’ve been looking at our legacy contracts, and it seems you’ve been getting free hosting from us since, er, 2008”. Indeed, in the early days of LXF, before Future knew about things like the internet, UKFast generously gave us not one, but two dedicated servers. One of these was shut down last year while the other, right up until early May, hosted linuxformat.com. There’s no way we could reasonably expect UKFast to continue to provide free hosting, especially since management have got us all drinking the digital-first Kool Aid. Times change and servers are expensive, so we decided to move things in-house.

Naturally, we thought our world-class devops team could sort all this out in the blink of an eye. So we documented our setup, outlined our (meagre) requirements, deciphered our database schema and sent our findings upstream. It didn’t take long for them to find a solution: “How about we give you some AWS credit and you chaps sort it out?” So, with only 30 days’ grace hosting left, Jonni Bidwell set to work. Read on to find out why, besides archaic PHP, it took him 33 days to succeed–mastering a DVD on the way. And to learn scandalous, never-before-printed details about the shoe and ham-strings that held the previous website together.

We pride ourselves on the sound Linux advice we impart to our readers, and one of our favourite mantras has always been “keep your software updated”. If you don’t then sooner or later you’ll be running buggy, vulnerable software that probably won’t work correctly with its modern counterparts.

Imagine then the shaking of heads when we tell you that our previous server was running Ubuntu 8.04, Drupal 5 and PHP 5.2. What can we say? Do as we say, not as we do. Yet our situation was probably not that unique. We inherited a legacy system that our subscribers relied on. It didn’t fall over, so we did our best to keep it up while at the same time doing our actual jobs. Go us! At one point the uptime was well over 1,000 days, and the fact that both hardware and operating system survived the extent of our stewardship is testament to the resilience of Linux, Apache and the rest of them.