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.
adn , as expeted several things I forgot to do:
– enable the google analytics on the joomla site. stupid. 4 days without analytics. I would have picked that up if teh dashboard would have jumped over the last day of the old server. but instead is tood right there, in 30 january making me think it didn’t process info yet.
– I forgot to start spammassassin filter :D. couldn’t figure out why all the sudden I started to get a lot of stupid spam I stopped getting a long while ago.
and who knows what else