Bringing mcr.wtf home, part two
mcr.wtf lives at home now.
Back in June I wrote about bringing mcr.wtf home. I was planning to move this instance off a DigitalOcean droplet and onto a machine in my house. I promised an update once it happened.
It happened. This morning, in fact. In a couple hours of downtime I transferred all the data to the new server and switched up the DNS. The new server, by the way, is a reconditioned Dell Optiplex bought with the money I’d collected from donations.
The boring preparation that made it boring
The move itself was rehearsed a week ago against a copy of the database, which is the single best decision in this whole project. By cutover day I had a step-by-step runbook with timings, and every scary unknown had already been met once in a low-stakes setting. All the software was set up, all that needed to be done was move the data and switch the DNS over.
The other prerequisite was backups. The new machine was already shipping nightly encrypted database dumps offsite. Last week I also ran through restoring a backup too. A backup you haven’t tested, isn’t a backup!
Moving day
The short version: stop the old server, take a final database dump, copy it home, restore it, check everything, then point DNS at my house.
- Final database dump: 21 minutes
- Copying the dump over: 8 minutes
- Restoring into PostgreSQL: 55 minutes
- Row counts afterwards: identical, every table
Then the DNS flip. Within three minutes, other Mastodon servers were already delivering posts to the machine in my house. The fediverse doesn’t hang about!
I should say, I haven’t moved absolutely everything from the Cloud yet. I’m hosting media and pushing backups to Wasabi. This is something I’ll look at but haven’t any plans to change yet.
The victory lap
Feeling confident, I applied the latest Mastodon bugfix release, a kernel update, and a reboot, to make sure it automatically recovers.
Finally I powered the old droplet off. It gets destroyed for good in a couple of weeks once I’m sure I won’t need to crawl back.
What this actually gets me
- The old server: 2 CPU cores, permanently full disk, ~£50 a month.
- The new one: 6 cores, NVMe storage with room to breathe, and it costs me electricity.
- The database came out of the move 37GB smaller.
- Everything is snappier. Noticeably. Cheapo real hardware embarrasses what fifty quid a month can rent.
What it means for you (if you’re on mcr.wtf)
- Nothing changed. Your account, posts, follows, timelines, and media are all intact.
- The site is faster.
- Your data now lives in Manchester, with encrypted offsite backups not in a datacentre owned by someone whose name I don’t know. I can point at it.
That’s all for now. If anything seems off, or you just want to tell me this was a terrible idea, I’m at @kev@mcr.wtf, which I can now say is a machine I could go and pat.