In an Infra team meeting a few months back, it was agreed upon on replacing Cherokee with nginx as our webserver, owing to lack of documentation, no support for .htaccess, and difficulty in creating rewrite rules. Most of us preferred nginx over apache for its performance and caching. All this time, we had been testing a separate instance of nginx in our infrastructure.
After spending two months with nginx, we believe that our instance of nginx is mature enough to host our entire ecosystem of sites and services, and that it is time to pull the plug for Cherokee. We will miss it for its ease of use and its jolly-colorful admin interface. On the other hand, we are excited about the prospects of moving to a better supported and more robust web server in nginx. And btw, we’ll be moving all our MySQL databases to the more open MariaDB platform, a decision also taken during the aforementioned meeting.
Migration has been planned in phases. We’ll start with our trusty-old main interface to the world–the blog. On the new server, it will have a new home at blog.openmandriva.org. This will be followed by our Wiki and Forums. Other sites will follow later. At every stage, the Infra team will send out notifications on om-general mailing list, so to allow for sufficient time for users to save / backup their data. Tomorrow we start with the blog. More updates later…
