Ok, its um.. <checks date of last post> been a while.

I wanted to make a post because, well, picking this up again is something I have time for. And also, I just spent a couple of hours doing something which really hammered home to me the value of both virtualisation *and* the Fedora project’s rigour and reliability.

Firstly, lets start with the output..

Fancy eh? <crickets>

So what are you looking at here? Quite simply, something which is surprisingly cool. On the right, I spun up the disk image of an old server I used to run under a Xen hypervisor (on Centos 6 I think?). It used to be a database server running a mysql database, along with phpmyadmin via apache for back end data checks while developing against it. As can be seen, I haven’t logged into the server since 27 March 2016.

I wanted to go fetch some of the data off the server, and while I was at it, decided to refresh the image so that if I need it again, its a bit more contemporary!

On the left, is the same server image, upgraded all the way from Fedora 21, to the current state of play Fedora 38. Yes, that’s almost 9 years of updates which applied successfully.. and both phpmyadmin and mariadb are all there along with, importantly, my data! Now running under Libvirt on Rocky Linux.. a looong way from Xen.

ok I wrote this draft a few weeks ago F39 is out now.. I *almost* have time for his hobby 🙂