I spent a bit of time this weekend knocking a job off my digital “todo” list. Back last fall, the old Parallels virtual machine that ran the Flyfish listserver archives finally succumbed to old age. It was a very old instance of Red Hat Linux, but the virtual disk had become corrupt and would not stay up. I had copied all of the data, configurations and programs (WAIS/free-WAIS-sf) to my iMac, but had been procrastinating on trying to rebuild. I wanted to change Linux distros and I figured I’d probably have to re-make all the programs, and was “looking forward” to compatibility issues when I set it up. However, cold, nasty weather is good for hacking and not much else, so, I started the process.
I decided to run a basic server installation of Debian. I didn’t want any of the GUI and it seemed that this was going to be one of the best platforms to grab a basic installation like this, plus I like Debian and the way the update and program installation work. I first played with it on the Raspberry Pi, which initially came out with a version of Debian. So, I downloaded the ‘Net install ISO (about 280MB), and created a VM. I then installed the packages I wanted, and set about installing the archive server.
I have almost 25 years of postings to this listserver archived, so it took a few minutes to copy over all that “wisdom.” Then, the Wais configuration “source” files. Then…the binaries for the Wais programs…and they ran! Guess since I built it with gcc and the target was i386, there really weren’t any dependencies from the old platform. I did have to tweak one of my scripts that had a hard-coded path to the cgi-bin directory, which has moved out from under the var/www path under Debian to improve security.
I’ve still got a bit of cleanup to do, including collecting and indexing the postings from 7/1/14 to the present, but that’s a simple task.
The old thing took just a couple hours to set up. Check it out at archives.flyfishlist.org!