My site was down for much of today as I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my image from ground up. This was something I had considered doing for some time now. The old site had been through a couple of ubuntu upgrades and was chugging along, but I always thought it would be good to do a fresh install. However I never really wanted to dump the time into it. Then I saw this article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14284/amazon-offers-another-amd-epyc-powered-instance-t3a

I have been interested in AMD’s latest processors as they seem to be killing it with their Ryzen line. I checked the pricing and saw that the price for running my site was about half of the cost of what I was paying for my old t2 instance. Additionally at the same price level I was getting more CPU cores with the new instances. I hadn’t even realized that Amazon had rolled out their regular T3s or these new T3a instances. I figured it would be an easy switch, stop my instance, change the instance type and start up the new instance.

I attempted that with no luck. It seems that since I setup my site Amazon had come out with a new Network card driver, which my Linux kernel didn’t have. I switched back to my T2, and decided I would start building my new image on the side. When I had time I would spin up my new image and start working on the Amazon setup. I was happy to see there is now IPv6 support available. All in all there was just lots of new stuff to play with. I finally reached the point yesterday where I decided to backup my site and finally go for it. I had hit a stopping point where I brought my nginx config over (which had all my SSL settings), but I didn’t have my DNS pointed to the new machine in order to pull down new certificates. Without the certificates nginx wouldn’t launch, and at the same time because of HSTS preloading I can’t test an unencrypted version of my site. I pointed to the new IP this morning in my DNS settings and then proceeded to start working on restoring the backup of my site while I waited for the old DNS cache entries to expire so that I would pull down my new certificates.

Right around that time I had to depart as we had mother’s day plans and thus the site needed to remain down. When I got back on tonight I finally finished restoring my backup of wordpress and we are back. Now that I am back up I realized that my SSL Labs score dropped so I have been tweaking my configuration to get back up to my high A+ score.

Future projects now will include figuring out IPv6 routing. I was able to assign an IPv6 address to my instance and VPC, but when I try to SSH to that address it seems to time out. When I get that working I would like to setup DNS to allow getting to my site solely with IPv6. Anyway that is all for now as I need to go to bed, but more updates coming soon hopefully.