The URL of my blog has been dependent on the machine it was on for a long time, because I was afraid of change. But I figured there simply aren’t that many people reading it anyway, so who cares if the location changes. The new URL is http://enno.homeunix.net/.

Technically, homeunix.net is one of the domains available for users of dyndns.org. You can have a subdomain for free, and they take care of the DNS magic for you. All you have to do is tell them what IP your server is using. It doesn’t matter that it already has another name. It can even change its IP frequently. Mine doesn’t, but at some point, I might move the whole site, and all I need to do then is update the IP at dyndns.org.

The apache server on eressea.upb.de that hosts my web pages was told to react differntly to requests for enno.homeunix.net, via Virtual Hosts. This has become a breeze to configure with the Apache2 in Debian. All I had to do was create a new file in /etc/apache2/sites-available, insert a few lines, and link it from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.

Finally, I also made a quick mod_rewrite rule so requests to old urls stay valid but get sent to the new address. And while I’m aware none of this is magic, I’ve just never done it before and I’m surprised how easy it was.