No addresses or URLs have been shuffled, but today I finally managed to move our ‘Jade’ server (if anyone has caught notice, all machines in my area are domain named after minerals… my G4 laptop is ‘Topaz’, my beige PC is “Pyrite’, there is an old Mac named ‘Sphalerite’ acting as a mulit-user server for some old shockwave apps that people seem to still use) to our new, sleek X-Serve host.
I had elegant plans for a migration that included an Apache redirecting requests for our RSS 2 JS feed machine to a mirror on a spare server (‘Realgar”, yet another mineral!), and a temporary “hold on” message for all other requests…. but somehow I lost track of the root admin password on the old server. Just as well, the migration part was about 20 minutes, and the old Linux server was taken offline in the harshest fashion — pulling the plug out of the wall.
The migration was pretty easy- using phpMyAdmin to generate an SQL file export of the entire movabletype (and phpBB) databases, which were then command-line imported into mySQL on the new host. All files were grabbed via FTP from old to new (after tangling with your usual unix permissions song and dance). There were MT plugins and extlibs to slide around as well.
Hopefully, there will be a performance boost on the new box over the old PII host. I took the opportunity to upgrade to MT 2.5, to get the MT-Blacklist Plugin up to current specs and a new Blacklist file, and streamlined my category RSS feeds from this blog to a single template, rather than the kludge one template per category set up I made when I was young and ignorant (3 months ago).
I am still fighting some weird quirks with the MT RSS Feed plug-in, some pages it works fine, and on others all rebuilds generate script errors and nasty Apache 500 spitbacks, but that can wait.
Hopefully I can quit futzing with the server and get back to developing new stuff.
Now, where is that champagne? Ahhh, there it is. A toast to a fine bloggy new year for 2004!
Cheers until Jan 2…
