Retiring a Hetzner Server

by Tykling

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09. may 2019 21:44 UTC

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I've used Hetzner for years as one of the places I run jailhosts. Their physical servers are cheap and stable and their support is great especially when considering the price.

I usually use a server for around two years before I start considering retiring it and switcing to a new one. Then it takes me another 1-2 years to actually do something about it. This particular servers was running an old 10.3-STABLE which is EOL long ago, so it was high time to kill it off.

Usually the process is:

• Buy (rent) the new server
• Install the new jailhost
• Move jails as time permits to the new server until eventually nothing remains on the old server
• Cancel the old server

Today I retired an old PX70 model server which has been waiting for me to move the last few jails off of it for months. The server was close to 1000 days uptime when I finally shut it down!

10:55AM  up 961 days, 15:29, 6 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.06, 0.07

Nothing important (or even public-facing) was running on it for the final 18 months or so, but it did still run some of my monitoring and stuff.

I've had this server for around 4 years, but the disk drives are a bit more than 5 years according to the disk drives S.M.A.R.T. info:

  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   094   094   000    Old_age   Always       -       47321
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   094   094   000    Old_age   Always       -       47319

Which comes down to 1924 days or 5.4 years. That is decent. They are both HGST HUS724040ALA640 4TB drives.

I wanted to share how I wiped the server before returning it to Hetzner.

• I went to the Hetzner Robot and enabled the rescue system (FreeBSD is available but anything with dd will work for this).
• I rebooted the server into the rescue system.
• I started screen
• Finally I ran dd to overwrite both harddrives

[root@rescue ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=1M
dd: /dev/ada0: short write on character device
dd: /dev/ada0: end of device
3815448+0 records in
3815447+1 records out
4000787030016 bytes transferred in 28708.789739 secs (139357565 bytes/sec)
[root@rescue ~]# 

[root@rescue ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=1M
dd: /dev/ada1: short write on character device
dd: /dev/ada1: end of device
3815448+0 records in
3815447+1 records out
4000787030016 bytes transferred in 28958.672438 secs (138155057 bytes/sec)
[root@rescue ~]# 

Bye bye server!