April 2022 the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will come out. I did a test installation of it. OpenSSL 3.0 comes standard with it. 20.04 had OpenSSL 1.1.1f. OpenSSL 3.0.2 15 Mar 2022 (Library: OpenSSL 3.0.2 15 Mar 2022). Most of my installations are Ubuntu servers not GUI Desktops. I have spent time cleaning up my current Ubuntu servers. I upgraded my two DNS servers with the latest IPv6 EUI-64 addresses and configured the Fortinet 60E to use them for the two WordPress servers. I will no longer assign my own IPv6 addresses but use the EUI-64 addressing for the NIC cards. You can see a section on EUI-64 for details.
In the menus, I cover many interesting topics from VEEAM Community backup. Changing the screen colors in VIM to other colors. How to create DHCP, DHCPv6, DNS servers, and SAMBA server. How to configure a SCP between servers without a password using keys. Information on UFW: Uncomplicated Firewall.
Many years ago, my web site started on IIS on a windows workstation. I moved to Fedora because it was Red Hat. It was not easy to use and backup. I moved to CentOS because it was better designed for security, but it got in the way of backup performance and copying pictures to it. I had both Ubuntu 16.04 and CentOS 7 on my WordPress servers recently. I dropped CentOS 7 because it was 33% slower on backups. The SELinux security system was not easy to setup and modify. It kept getting in the way. MYSQL upgrades on CentOS kept crashing the databases and I had a lot of manual work to do.
I migrated both to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I usually do not do in place upgrades to the web servers. I will create new ones and use duplicator in WordPress to migrate the web sites. This cleans the legacy junk files up.
LTS is Long Term Support: xx.04 version is Ubuntu is 5-year security and patch support. Every 2 years the new LTS version comes out. 2022 was the last one. April 2024 should be the next one.
Home Lab
This is my basement home lab server. It is not a production server per say. It is for my test lab. I might get a 2U Gen 10 refurbished server to replace it. It would be cool to do SSD drives on the new server. I do have a fixed budget based on my wife, and two children.
My HP360e Gen8 server was bought to host my Ubuntu and other Linux distros virtual machines. I added more gigabit NICs and connected them to ports on the Fortinet 60E to setup subnets. VMWare 6 changes the dual six core Xeons to 24 vCPUs. I put in 4 x 3TB SAS drives 7200 RPM in RAID 10 for best read and write performance for my web sites, copying files, etc. My next server might do 8 or 12 disks. For now, 5.6 TB RAID 10 is fine.
I do have UTM on the Fortinet 60E. I have all the security patches installed for VMWare 6. Essentials Kit was added for VEEAM backups. I can use 6 CPUs on the servers. I do not need VMotion and other higher end features of VMware for one stand-alone server. VEEAM does backup my VMs. Ubuntu has UFW on them. I have 2FA on SSH. So, I do practice defense in depth.
Ubuntu Servers
Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTSR is the latest Long Term Support Release. You don’t get cutting edge. What you get is Long-Term patching for security. You get stability. I added in
With VMWare, I can break up the four vdisk
/boot 2GB: Yes, it is larger than needed but gives you room for more kernel files.
/ 25 GB for MariaDB that I use for WordPress
/var 1+ TB for the apache web sites
/swap for swap space
4 vdisks separated for performance. LVM and VMWare 6 do not work well together and will cause issues. I have been able to turn off the VM and expand the vdisk for /var then go into Ubuntu and expand it. Most of the time, I rather do a clean new install and just move the files and web sites. I like to clean up legacy junk left behind.
Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTSR is the latest Long Term Support Release. You don’t get the latest kernel like 21.04. You don’t get cutting edge. What you get is Long-Term patching for security. You get stability. I added in
Apache 2 latest release
MariaDB 11.1.x
PHP 8.x
With VMWare, I can break up the four vdisk
/boot 2GB: Yes, it is larger than needed but gives you room for more kernel files.
/ 25 GB for MariaDB that I use for WordPress
/var 1+ TB for the apache web sites
/swap for swap space
4 vdisks separated for performance. LVM and VMWare 6 do not work well together and will cause issues. I have been able to turn off the VM and expand the vdisk for /var then go into Ubuntu and expand it. Most of the time, I rather do a clean new install and just move the files and web sites. I like to clean up legacy junk left behind.
Clean up old kernels does save space. I have seen some of my install after a year or two have 10+ linux-images still around. So I wun the two commands and then do my house keeping.
Find your old kernels and purge them in 20.04. List them and purge the older versions. I usually keep the last 2.
dpkg –list | egrep -i –color ‘linux-image|linux-headers|linux-modules’ | awk ‘{ print $2 }’
sudo apt purge linux-headers-5.6.11-050611 linux-headers-5.6.11-050611-lowlatency linux-image-unsigned-5.6.11-050611-lowlatency linux-modules-5.6.11-050611-lowlatency