Some brief notes on a successful migration of my Mastodon server, running the glitch-soc fork) from one Intel NUC to another. Mostly in case I need to do it again!

Overview of migration

I set up the machine with Debian 13 stable with LVM and LUKS, and then ran my usual set-up / hardening script.

I followed the official Mastodon installation instructions to get started.

Once I had created the mastodon user, I then rsync’d the live/ directory from my old server to my new server, rather than going through the installation.

I also dumped and rsync’d from my old machine the postgresql database, and the redis database, following the Mastodon migration instructions. I moved across the nginx config, and the entirety of /etc/letsencrypt, although I could have generated new certs easily enough.

I used the new systemd unit files.

I then followed the glitch-soc update instructions.

I finally adjusted DNS and added some temporary NAT rules to redirect traffic while DNS changes were propogating.

Servers so far

When I set up my Mastodon server in early 2018, I started with a Raspberry Pi 3.

I moved to a Raspberry Pi 4 (some brief notes) in 2021, I think.

When I had about 5,000 followers, my Raspberry Pi-based setup started to struggle, and I moved to an old Intel NUC (i5-3427U, 8GB RAM). I don’t recall exactly when that was.

That was great, but it has started to struggle recently (just over 9,000 followers, and a busy feed), and I have been running out of disk space on it, even with regular media purge cycles.

So now it is running on a bit less old Intel NUC (i7-5557U CPU @ 3.10GHz, 16GB RAM), with some more space for my bad jokes.