During the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some changes with my server; this might have been noticed from outside too.
Getting down to business, it’s like this:
– I dropped my second ISP so basically my main server remained without a backup internet connection. It’s too expensive to keep a backup during these times 🙂
– I upgraded my server from my old desktop dell pc PIII with 256 mb RAM to a newer server dell pc dual proc PIII@866Mhz with 512 MB RAM and 2 19GB SCSI HDD in software raid (0 for swap and 1 for rest). Sometime in the near future I plan a memory upgrade, not sure yet how much since the MB has only 4 memory slots and all 4 of them are filled. Obsiously I moved the 80GB hdd from the old pc to the new server 😀
– I installed centos 5 latest CLI only and switched from “source-based” to “rpm-based” using yum (you might not know but everything on my old server was source based. needless to say that upgrading was a real pain specifically when I had to upgrade commonly used stuff such as libs or compilers or even interpreters)
– I downgraded mysql from 5.1.x to 5.0.y (it’s basically what centos came with)
– upgraded xmail from 1.23 to 1.26
– upgraded apache as well from 2.0 to 2.2 (centos came with)
– downgraded php from 5.2.x to 5.1.6 (it wasn’t properly supported by most of my sites anyway)
– upgraded gallery2 plugins to latest (not gallery 2 it self yet)
– upgraded smf from 0.9 to 1.1
– upgrade wordpress from 2.8.6 to 2.9.1 (did you know that the migration tool DOES NOT work? I just found out myself)
– upgraded php link directory from 2.1.1 to 2.2.0
– partially upgraded joomla and components to 1.5 latest
– dropped bugzilla and a bunch of other stuff
and now, I’m watching the logs to see what else is not behaving properly and fix it.
I had so many things I wanted to write about while I was doing upgrades but I forgot most of them. I’ll try to summarize how it all went.
– I wanted to start out clean and fresh so after installing and upgrading all the needed software, I started installing the first sites. And I started with wordpress.
My first idea was to create a reverse proxy with apache but I just couldn’t get that working with wordpress.
So I then decided to actually move the old things to the new hdd and export then import the DB data. However, I did the stupid thing of changing all tables to use myisam engine so now I had to install all the software from scratch so that the db structure is recreated as needed and then semi-automatically add the data. Now that was painful.
I have to mention that I had a lot of trouble moving the data around too, as I needed a jumper for the storage hdd (the 80 gb one) to make it primary and I also needed a longer ide cable so I could fit both the hdd and the cd-rom in the casing. I took the jumper out of the cd-rom since I couldn’t find an ide cable so right now I’m running with no cd-rom. I shouldn’t need that anyway, unless the system goes down since I do everything from remote.
There is still the problem of accommodating the new server space-wise since the old one was a desktop, “flat”, and this one is tower.
I also had to change the fans since they were pretty loud.
Well, that’s about all I remember now. But since I was struggling with this for over a week, you can imagine how much trouble I was in. Anyway, let’s hope for the best and that now I can resume my site-migration from html+ssi+cgi to joomla.
