Today I played Tetris over a serial console connection, on a Vax 4000 running OpenBSD. I haven't felt that 1337 since a long time.
I am going to get rid of that Vax system though. If that's your stuff, contact me privately.
asciinema in its greatness:
I am running since a decade a small Debian VM, that I use for basic web and mail hosting. Since most of the VM setup is done manually and not following the Infrastructure As Code pattern, it is faster to simply copy the filesystem when switching providers instead of reconfiguring everything.
The steps involved are:
1. create a backup of the filesystem using tar of rsync, excluding dynamic content
rsync --archive \
--one-file-system --numeric-ids \
--rsh "ssh -i private_key root@server:/ /local_dir
or
tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz \
--numeric-owner \
--exclude=/backup.tar.gz \
--one-file-system /
Notice here the --one-file-system switch which avoids back'ing up the content of mount points like /proc, /dev.
If you have extra partitions with a mounted filesystem, like /boot or home you need do add a separate backup for those.
2. create a new VM on the new cloud provider, verify you have a working console access, and power it off.
3. boot on the new cloud provider a rescue image
4. partition the disk image on the new provider.
5. mount the new root partition, and untar your backup on it. You could for instance push the local backup via rsync, or download the tar archive using https.
6. update network configuration and /etc/fstab
7. chroot into the target system, and reinstall grub
This works surprisingly well, and you if made your backup locally, you can test the whole procedure by building a test VM with your backup. Just replace the deboostrap step with a command like tar -xvpzf /path/to/backup.tar.gz -C /mount_point --numeric-owner
Using this procedure, I moved from Hetzner (link in French language) to Digital Ocean, from Digital Ocean to Vultr, and now back at Hetzner.
