Migration to Scaleway ARM server

The C1 Server

Scaleway started selling ARM based hosted server in April. I've intended to blog about this for a while, since it was time to upgrade from wheezy to jessie was timely, why not switch provider from an X86 based to ARM one at the same time?

In many ways scaleway node is opposite to what "Enterprise ARM" people are working on. Each server is based on an oldish ARMv7 Quad-Core Marvell Armada XP, instead of a brand new 64-bit ARMv8 cpu. There is no UEFI, ACPI or any other "industry standards" involved, just a smooth web interface and a command line tool to manage your node(s). And the node is yours, it's not shared with others with virtualization. The picture above is a single node, which is stacked with 911 other nodes into a single rack.

This week, the C1 price was dropped to a very reasonable €2.99 per month, or €0.006 per hour.

Software runs on hardware, news at 11

The performance is more than enough for my needs - shell, email and light web serving. dovecot, postfix, irssi and apache2 are just an apt-get away. Anyone who says you need x86 for Linux servers is forgetting that Linux software is open source, and if not already available, can be compiled to any architecture with little effort. Thus the migration pains were only because I chose to modernize configuration of dovecot and friends. Details of the new setup shall be left for another post.