MOOSE is something between a Debian-derived distribution and a devops-ready virtual machine image. Confused? Learn more in our introduction to MOOSE.
What MOOSE Does
We manage our moose (the servers!) using Salt for configuration management, deploying several hundred salt states to each server to configure:
- Debian Linux on 64-bit CPUs
- Nginx, Varnish and Apache for high-speed web serving
- MySQL (now mariadb) for databases
- Postfix, Dovecot, Postfix.admin, Roundcube and other tools for hosting email
- BorgBackup for daily and weekly backups of your data
- helpful scripts so that you can get on with building websites, sending emails, and getting the most out of your server
Welcome to your server
All servers managed by MOOSE also have a welcome page available at their web index, for example that of our test server moose.faelix.net. This page contains links to the services hosted on that server such as webmail and various administrative pages, as well as contact and other information.
In addition to that public-facing web page, all servers managed by MOOSE have a file /root/README-from-faelix.txt containing the following:
- hardware configuration
- networking configuration
- passphrases, passwords, and other important or secret data
This README file is only accessible by the root user using ssh or sftp. Be sure to take a copy of this file and keep it secure! It contains the passphrase to access your backups: without this passphrase you basically do not have a backup of your server. It is essential to restore anything from your backups, and unless you give it to us, nobody at Faelix has a copy of this passphrase.
Backups
We’ve written a whole page dedicated to MOOSE backups, how they work, how to make additional ones, and how to restore. But just in case you’re in a rush to restore something, here’s the cheat-sheet:
. /etc/faelix/moose/borgbackupto get the configuration loadedexport BORG_PASSPHRASEso you don’t need to type the passphraseborg mount $REPOSITORY /mntto mount the backups so you can copy files out of previous versionsumount /mntwhen you’re done