Moving

By chimo on (updated on )

Following in the footsteps of others, I am reducing my dependence on US companies. As a result, I’m slowly moving my workloads from Linode to OVH (a company from France). Since I’m in Canada and OVH has datacenters here, choosing a server located in my country seemed to make sense.

I got a “vps2020-essential-2-4-80” with the following specs:

  • Processor: 2 vCores
  • Memory: 4 GB
  • Storage: 80 GB NVMe

Which is pretty much what I was running on Linode.

So far I’ve moved ~16 containers over (including this blog), which is about half of my workload. Thanks to Incus, it’s been a pretty smooth-and-easy transition.

One hiccup I ran into so far is “incus file pull” corrupting my SQL dumps:

# Create dump
postgres@postgres:~$ pg_dump miniflux > miniflux.sql
# Checksum
postgres@postgres:~$ md5sum miniflux.sql
0bbe64223c54e01d3405151f31254e39  miniflux.sql
# Copy file to the host
chimo@linode:~$ incus file pull postgres/var/lib/postgresql/miniflux.sql /tmp/
# Checksum
chimo@linode:~$ md5sum /tmp/miniflux.sql
3e65e0e162781cef8e1d625b6511e943  /tmp/miniflux.sql

Trying to restore “miniflux.sql” to a new DB ended up giving me “ERROR: extra data after last expected column”.

To work around this, I ended up grabbing the dump file from the host’s “/var/lib/incus/containers/postgres/rootfs/var/lib/postgresql” directory and using “scp” to copy it over to OVH. Using “incus file push” to the container on OVH went fine.

Incus 6.9 on both Archlinux and Void Linux have the same behaviour.

Which brings me to the OS I decided to run on the new OVH VPS: Void Linux.

There are a couple of reasons for this: neither Alpine or Archlinux are available out-of-the-box on OVH (at least for the VPS type and location I chose). So I did a quick search for something along the lines of “OVH custom image” and one of the first results was: “Void Linux installation on OVH VPS”.

Coincidentally, I gave Void Linux in a quick mention at the end of a recent blog post. I took it as a “sign” and spun up a Debian VPS which I replaced with Void Linux more-or-less following the instructions of the guide.

Back to moving stuff over now. See you soon.