If you noticed I hadn't updated the blog for a few days, you may have already anticipated that I've been up to something.... and you would be right.
The virtualisation platform that powers this blog (and a lot more, including Lumicall and DruCall) has just been updated to Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) on Debian 7.0 (Wheezy, release candidate 1)
The former platform was regular Xen with the xm toolstack on Debian 6.0 (squeeze) (and before that, lenny). The dom0 base system had been running uninterrupted for 720 days at the point I shut it down earlier this week - that is the typical timeframe between two major Debian releases, and it is also a firm endorsement of Debian's stability.
Furthermore, the new setup is on new hardware with a new hosting provider, Init7 who offer native IPv6 in a secure Swiss data center. So I've taken the opportunity to add some AAAA records to my DNS, restart Apache and you can now access this blog with pure IPv6
As well as thanking Init7 for making the transition go very smoothly, I'd also like to point out a couple of other things that helped: using provider-independent (PI) IP addresses, and the sheer convenience of using tinc to securely bridge the VLANs in the old and new data centers for a week allowed this change to happen with hardly any downtime at all.