This weekend I decided in a foolhardy moment to upgrade the server that runs this blog and other domains I maintain. I moved the system from CentOS 7 to the new CentOS Stream 9. Everything is apparently in good working order now, at least as far as I can tell.
During the process, I also discovered the Ansible playbooks I thought I’d been keeping up weren’t even remotely up to the task. I suspect this has a lot to do with moving across two major versions of a RHEL-ish system this way. Fortunately I had made good system backups, including all the system configuration and database bits. And even where the configurations didn’t work as-is, they had enough clues in them for me to edit the new ones properly.
It sapped about eight hours of my time this weekend, but I guess it was worthwhile. Especially since I shouldn’t have to worry about a big upgrade again until approximately 2027. Plus I got to reaffirm to myself that I haven’t entirely lost all technical skill while being a PHB.
No major revelations here, no big wisdom. Just happy to have got some piece of upkeep in my life done.