I am in the process of migrating a bunch of stuff off an ancient server which has been up continuously for 5 years and is being sunset (the hardware is tired and RedHat is ending support for RHEL4).  The migration process has been a potent reminder as to the many hidden costs of installed software.  For instance, at the time that the old machine was set up I used Subversion for version control and Trac for documentation and ticketing.  Once these were working nicely for my purposes, I stopped upgrading them.  Now you could say that’s a pretty stupid thing to do, but when you have very limited time would you rather fix a bug or upgrade your tools, especially when those are working!

So now of course I had a brand new machine running RHEL5 and much more up-to-date versions of Subversion and Trac.  I have been using Git and Github for a more recent project but didn’t want to make a switch here as there is a lot of info in Trac that is nicely sync’d to the source.  So how hard could it be?  Well, the Subversion upgrade was a cinch.  I dumped the repository on the old machine and loaded it on the new machine.  Including time to set up Subversion, configure Apache to serve up the repo, and my laptop to connect, this all took less than 1 hour. 

But then I got around to Trac where I was on version 0.10.4 and the current version is 0.12.2.  As it turns out in between they switched templating engines and went from SQLite2 to SQLite3.  I had to upgrade the old machine through several versions before I was able to export my data in a format that the new install could consume.  Even then the documentation on how to do this was spotty at best.  At one point I got so frustrated that I thought it might be easier to downgrade my new install to 0.10.4 but an attempt to install that old version on RHEL5 went nowhere.  In the end I got it all done but it took almost 3 hours. Granted that someone who does this more often than once every other year might have been much faster, but my Google searches suggest that I wasn’t the only one to find this a bit tricky.

I still have quite a few other things to migrate to the new machine which I am sure will produce some similar problems.  I could of course try to find someone to do all of this, but (a) that’s not easy given that this is a small one-off project and (b) I like to stay connected to how things actually work.  And this object lesson in the cost of installed software was a good reminder for when this topic comes up with startups.  For anything that’s not core to your success, consider using a Software As A Service offering over installing and running your own.

I am in the process of migrating a bunch of stuff off an ancient server which has been up continuously for 5 years and is being sunset (the hardware is tired and RedHat is ending support for RHEL4).  The migration process has been a potent reminder as to the many hidden costs of installed software.  For instance, at the time that the old machine was set up I used Subversion for version control and Trac for documentation and ticketing.  Once these were working nicely for my purposes, I stopped upgrading them.  Now you could say that’s a pretty stupid thing to do, but when you have very limited time would you rather fix a bug or upgrade your tools, especially when those are working!

So now of course I had a brand new machine running RHEL5 and much more up-to-date versions of Subversion and Trac.  I have been using Git and Github for a more recent project but didn’t want to make a switch here as there is a lot of info in Trac that is nicely sync’d to the source.  So how hard could it be?  Well, the Subversion upgrade was a cinch.  I dumped the repository on the old machine and loaded it on the new machine.  Including time to set up Subversion, configure Apache to serve up the repo, and my laptop to connect, this all took less than 1 hour. 

But then I got around to Trac where I was on version 0.10.4 and the current version is 0.12.2.  As it turns out in between they switched templating engines and went from SQLite2 to SQLite3.  I had to upgrade the old machine through several versions before I was able to export my data in a format that the new install could consume.  Even then the documentation on how to do this was spotty at best.  At one point I got so frustrated that I thought it might be easier to downgrade my new install to 0.10.4 but an attempt to install that old version on RHEL5 went nowhere.  In the end I got it all done but it took almost 3 hours. Granted that someone who does this more often than once every other year might have been much faster, but my Google searches suggest that I wasn’t the only one to find this a bit tricky.

I still have quite a few other things to migrate to the new machine which I am sure will produce some similar problems.  I could of course try to find someone to do all of this, but (a) that’s not easy given that this is a small one-off project and (b) I like to stay connected to how things actually work.  And this object lesson in the cost of installed software was a good reminder for when this topic comes up with startups.  For anything that’s not core to your success, consider using a Software As A Service offering over installing and running your own.