If you read this the DNS changes for samaflost.de have reached you. The websites and mail are more or less running smoothly by now. Finally.
I decided to not use Plesk at all but rely on myself and a couple of FAQs to do all the configuration stuff. This is all under the assumption that Plesk will leave config files alone as long as it doesn't think it should change one, and I don't intend to make it change them.
After I figured out how to get my procmail recipes into qmail - thank God for Dave Sill's Life with qmail - the biggest missing piece now is integrating Spamassassin and qmail.
The whole migration has eaten up about a week of spare time devoted to hacking by now, time to get back to "normal" life.
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My current hosting provider is going out of business so I'm moving on. The new server is already up and running but as long as the domain transfer is underway I'm unable to properly configure web and mail for it.
When I installed the old server it was running a web-based admin-software named Confixx that was standing in my way more often than not. It took me a few months to get rid of it completely. The new machine is running what seems to be its predecessor in spirit, an AJAXy web-app named Plesk and I've already started to hate it. I'm seriously contemplating to remove it from the system, but this will probably not work without jumping through some hoops.
Anyway, Plesk is interfering with my manual configuration and I can't configure virtual web hosts or mail servers before the domain is transfered. This probably means the website will be down (not that anybody would notice) and the samaflost.de mail domain dysfunctional (not that anybody used it much) for a few hours if not days in the near future.
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Phew, took quite some time and effort, but now all old are here and archived, at the same time they went offline in the old blog.
Sorry for all the noise.
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Well, choosing the domain name turned out to be the hardest part of all. All bodewig.FOO domains have been taken. Even if bodewig.de looks as if it had been designed be me, it isn't. Oh, and it has been looking like it currently does for five years or more now.
I wanted a family-domain, maybe one of our children wants to start a blog one day? At least they'll need email addresses.
The next attempt was trying anagrams - a typical geek-reflex. A few lines of Perl later I realized that I have "I Web God" in my last name, oh that irony. Nothing that at least sounded well.
In the end my wife suggested to play with the first letters of our first names, and that it is - Sarah, Manuela, Florian and Stefan.
Boring, I know.
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OK, I've done it, I now rent a root server.
The virtualized hosts that have been available looked as if they were highly underpowered. If you share a box with 256 MB of RAM with nine other customers this may or may not work - depends on what the others are doing. Many thanks to all who've responded to my question.
The machine runs SuSE - not exactly my favorite distro - and of course I managed to lock myself out with my very first attempts to use Yast. Far too many services running, too many ports open, and when I tried to change it somehow sshd wouldn't come back again (or my firewall rules have been too strict).
MTA is postfix, which should be OK once I learn my way around it. Spamassasin is installed as well. Apache2 with a load or modules as HTTPd. There also is a MySQL installation that might be needed by the installed confixx software, I'll need to find out.
Once the MTA is up and running the way I want it to work, I'll have to select a blogging backend and (manually, I'm afraid) import what I have. I'm torn between blosxom - which matches my workflow pretty well - and wordpress since it wouldn't require me to think about layouts and styles. I'm no designer at all, in case that isn't obvious from this site's look.
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