This blog spent the last few years running on Ubuntu 16.04. It had 936 days of uptime when I finally worked up the nerve to touch it. The disk was 97% full, MySQL was 5.7, and there was a copy of WordPress old enough to be embarrassing for someone who works where I work.
So I dragged it up to 24.04 — in place, without taking the site down. Five LTS releases, MySQL 8, PHP 8.3, WordPress 7, all in one very long evening.
The fun part was finding out what’s been quietly running on here for a decade: a Mumble server, an Icecast stream, a Squid proxy, an OpenVPN server with certs from 2013, and a Java 6 install from 2010. Hello, old friends. And goodbye.
The less fun part was the box refusing to boot at all for a while — turns out Xen won’t load a modern compressed kernel — and a leftover package from 2016 deleting the database’s log directory right out from under it. Both survivable, because the very first thing I did was take backups. Always take the backups.
Anyway. It’s 2026 in here now. There’s even an AI bingo board.