All of my work over the past few months to upgrade my servers has been lost. I ran into some kind of compatibility problem between ESXi 3.5 u4, and then later ESXi 4, and my server hardware that caused networking to / from my virtual machines, the ESXi server, and my workstation to stop. The longer after an installation, the more often it would happen – and it was also preventing me from backing up my virtual machines over the network in any way. (Backups would start, then networking would die.)

In the course of troubleshooting and trying to recover from this, I managed to lose the virtual machines stored on the ESXi datastore. This was entirely my fault as I’d become so flustered over methods of fixing things without losing the VMs that, at one critical point, I reinstalled without having copied the data off to a 2nd drive.

The end result is that I ended up going back to a version of the single old Fedora server I’d been using months ago. I got this up and running under Workstation on my personal computer. Since then, I’ve rebuilt a Gentoo firewall, and have been working on another new version of Gentoo for Web and mail.

The transition over to that will likely take me a few more weeks. The good news is that I’m now familiar with the new operating system and it won’t take me as long to get things going as it did the first time around.

My server, currently turned off, will never be turned on again. I will cannibalize parts from it instead. Whenever I do move over to a dedicated server in the future, it will be a completely new system.