One Thing at a Time

You might have noticed the sudden drop of postings and then even an obvious disappearance of my site(s) and possibly even bounced email.

Well, how things go, servers need to be upgraded and ours were overdue and of course, sometimes things get a bit more complex than simply switching out 2 machines. Especially if the server is 500 miles away from you.

Last week we nicely managed to backup and transfer all the various sites from one machine to the other (that’s the reason for the void in postings), this included a ton of MySQL databases and users exports and websites shuffled next to my own, big array of them. Updated PHP and MySQL and PHPmyAdmin in the process too. One thing what the upgrade included was a new, cleaner and safer setup for all websites on the server – I knew this will break a couple of things as absolute and even relative paths have changed, but hopefully nothing major and now things are properly setup on the server itself.

We (Bear in this case) sent off the machine and hoped for a 30 minute down time of the server only.

Hoping is always nice. We knew, you can try as much as you want, there will always be some non-expeded factors coming to play. This one was definitely not in our computation : the new machine did not fit physically into the old slot at the data center in Dallas.

Ouch.

Not that the new machine is THAT much bigger but indeed a tad higher. Oh well. The painful thing about this fact is that this meant new IP numbers and updating of DNS servers which can take up to a week to resolve (because we did not expect THIS and so Bear didn’t set it to update faster than usually). Bear was quick in replacing the IP numbers via Timbuktu and Terminal in all the important configuration files and WOW, only a day later and it seems that most of the stuff is already resolving, I even again am getting mail and can get to this site!

Now of course there remain several path issues with the new setup (mainly visible with photos) and I am cleaning as we go. The myView section it hit the hardest, I’ll have to see what exactly the replacement path string for these pictures has to be. Thanks to BBEdit and TextWrangler which allow to search a whole folder for text and then in one quick sweep replace it all with the new line. That which is still not showing could be also stored in one or two of the MySQL databases and this means I’ll have to mess around with that. Thus, a little digging and a little combing is left to do.

But not all today, don’t want to waste too much time on this, don’t worry, it will all come back in full glory… just one thing at a time.