Ugh
So the vhosting provider this website is on has decided to go out of business at the end of the month. “No problem”, said I, “it’s a freebsd host so it should be simple to move everything over to a new machine.” So this morning I picked a new vhost provider, paid for a month’s worth of hosting, and started provisioning.
OH GOD THE PAIN!
My first attempt was to use a freebsd (10.something) image; gehenna was running 7.something, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble. It took me about a hour to realize that basically EVERYTHING had been subtly CADT‘ed to the point where I was starting to think about flinging my macbook (OSX is also infected with CADT, but since I’m not using it as a server the full fucking horror of the thing is not as much of a showstopper) across the room.
It didn’t help that freebsd switched to clang, which is, horrifically, even more pointlessly anal than gcc has EVER dreamed of being, and which meant that I had to rebuild pretty much all of my configure.sh'ed programs to compensate for various ridiculous “oh, we know what this function is supposed to do even if you don’t include the header files” failures.
So goodbye to freebsd and back to Linux, which has the dubious advantage of being brain-damaged for much longer than freebsd, so it can’t get /too/ badly fucked up. And then I get to fight with gnu configure (to build lighttpd) and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to need to wedge rc scripts into the all-singing-all-dancing init replacement that infests modern Linuces. But at least here I’ve got a usable package manager (yum) instead of the mindbogglingly stupid ports system that is spiked into the throat of freebsd.
11 packages that I need to carry: lighttpd (kind of horribly open sourceish, but about 1/20th as bloated as Apache is), spamassassin, postoffice, a dnsbl milter, the milter glue for spamassassin, tcp wrappers (no linux package for tcp wrappers. Slick!), git (I don’t know what sort of nonsensical policy is written into $CURRENT, so I’m sticking with 1.5.2.2-mp), discount, annotations, dropbear (not going to run opensshd, sorry!), and my dns (bind. Yuk. But it’s really the only game in town, and I don’t think I’ve got the patience to write my own dns server.) And only 4 of them use the special snowflake that is GNU configure (which I suspect is the app that made Docker necessary), so once I’ve got lighttpd,spamassassin, the dnsbl milter, the spamassassin milter glue (these last two require special versions to work with postoffice, because the stock ones won’t work with anything except sendmail for no good reason at all) built and starting up it will simply be a slow slide down the hill to insanity.