Lost interest in maintaining this server and website when I lost my job and couldn’t get another. The server’s Ubuntu, web server is Apache, and CMS is WordPress. It’s been running for a number of years without issue. I wouldn’t call it production because I don’t rely on it for anything. It’s just a test bed to familiarize myself with the software stack and gain some understanding of it’s setup and administration. I’m self hosting. Its an old computer repurposed as a server.
One other thing I experimented with is DNS. I wanted to be able to get to my server on my home network using wp.boba.org, whether on the public Internet or my home network. That worked fine for years with BIND9 and isc-dhcp.
I developed the habit of running upgrades periodically without testing. If there was a problem then no big deal, not production, figure out the issue, repair and proceed. Problems happened a few times with that approach and were always easily rectified.
DNS on the server stopped working after an upgrade. I tried many things and couldn’t figure out why. Rather than rollback the upgrade or restore the system from a backup I kept mucking with it to try and get it to work. No success. Eventually I just lost interest and let the server go dark. I wasn’t working so didn’t have anyone to talk with about the server. With no one to talk tech with about my server project there seemed no point to fixing it.
I did want to dip my toe in the water again after a while. I decided to rebuild the server and bring all components up to the latest release. I still couldn’t get BIND9 DNS to work. Searching BIND9 issues I found other Ubuntu users were also having problems with it. After searching for alternate DNS servers I decided to try dnsmasq. That got me to a working DNS on my home network. And that got me to the point of having the server up and publicly available again.
All development of the server configuration and settings was done on a virtual machine, vm, in a virtual network with virtual clients. VirtualBox is the hypervisor being used. Once everything worked as expected I migrated the server vm to a physical host. That took surprisingly little tweaking. Network addresses had to be changed from the virtual network settings to the home network settings and a different Ethernet device name entered where needed. That was about it to migrate from a virtual to physical server.
For all the world to see, in all its underwhelming glory, wp.boba.org is back. Enjoy.