The problem
So I’m back to the bloggers world. After over one year of silence here I’ve decided I need to do something about this blog. In 2020 I decided I want to move out of paid VPS and create my own dedicated machine. Mostly because of prices of such beefy machine. It was more efficient to put a dedicated machine and not to paid for VPS shared provider. Because the previous blog used BlogEngine.Net and I was not ready to pay $1000 for Windows Server instance, the blog had to wait until the work on the new server will be done. And the amount of work was huge. The most important information is that I decided to go with FreeBSD setup along with mirrored ZFS. It turned out to be very good choice for most of the tasks. I was hoping that mono project will handle my blog instance based on BlogEngine.Net and started moving other stuff.
I worked very hard and it paid off. Until I started to move my blog. It turned out that mono and mod_mono didn’t cope with BlogEngine on FreeBSD. Number of errors were thrown even on the main page loading, not to mention about anything else. Couple days wasted, but I decided not to give up and try latest Ubuntu in VM (since my server has 10C/20T cpu that is not a problem). This time the problems from FreeBSD were gone, but couple new messages shown at blog initialize time and eventually after spending another extra days trying to get it up I gave up.
The solution
Since BlogEngine.Net uses XML files as database it was not difficult to extract these entries using Notepad++ and put them into WordPress just by hitting “new blog entry” link. Then I had to edit some records in the database and update creation dates of posts to match the original. Nothing automated, everything by hand, because writing an automated tool would consume much more time than just a simple copy & paste operation in this case. The final step was to copy pictures from original directory and upload them to WordPress media and update posts to show these pictures in place.
Conclussion
I’m sure of one thing – I will never give another try to BlogEngine.Net despite it it a nice engine, but it is constrained to Windows platform only which is a big disadvantage. Some people will say “there is mono!” – yes, but this is an unstable environment for BlogEngine, maybe someone in the future will create an easy path for migrating between IIS and mono + mod_mono on Apache, but for now it is near to impossible and definitely not worth your time.
As for the FreeBSD I’m very pleased to use it on my dedicated server. I know it is secure, it has very good documentation, ZFS native support, snapshots etc. I love that. It runs for almost one year and after spending just couple weeks for an initial setup, I had no issues regarding system configuration, crashes etc.
What’s next
My plans are to keep posting here valuable information. I want to translate some older posts as well, because I’m aware that majority of world doesn’t speak Polish.
I the past months I had number of situations where I felt that I just solved some problem, but I would like to share the solution with the world. That’s why I want this blog to keep running. Because we programmers like to share knowledge.