Friday, May 16. 2008

Server Upgrades... lost entries...

My good friend, Rob, hosts my site for me, in return for helping with server maintenance. After being on Gentoo for the past three years, though, we decided it was time to switch to something a little easier to maintain, so last night we wiped the system partitions and installed Ubuntu server.

I'll say this: the setup is much faster! However, we had a few gotchas that surprised us -- it didn't setup our RAID array out-of-the-box, which led to a good hour of frustration as we tried to verify that the install wouldn't wipe it, and then to verify that we could re-assemble it. (We succeeded.) Additionally, we second-guessed a few things we shouldn't have, which led to needing to back out and reconfigure. But what was over a 12 hour install with Gentoo we accomplished in a matter of a few hours with Ubuntu server -- so it was a huge success that way.

Unfortunately, our mysqldump of all databases... wasn't, a fact we discovered only after importing it into the new system. I ended up losing my blog database and PEAR channel database. Fortunately, the PEAR channel has not changed at all in the past year, so we had an old backup that worked, and I had a snapshot of my blog database from three weeks ago I was able to use. As a result, there are a few missing entries, but for the most part, all works. If you commented on one of those missing entries, my apologies.

Now that the install is done, I'm also finalizing some design changes to my blog -- it's time to leave the black and white for more colorful grounds. Look for a revamp in the coming weeks!

Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney in Linux, Programming, PHP at 09:05 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)
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I've found that restorations from the MySQL binary files tend to have a higher success rate than SQL dumps, which is odd considering that the latter is considered the recommended practice as far as I know. Go figure. Glad Ubuntu Server is working out for you, though. I have one at home. :-)
#1 Matthew Turland (Link) on 2008-05-16 09:56 (Reply)
If I'd been there when the dump was made, I likely would have suggested binary -- I've had great luck with that approach in the past. But c'est la vie. :-)
#1.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-05-21 14:34 (Reply)
Me and a friend are also about to upgrade a Gentoo box to Ubuntu Server. Got any tips/notes/gotchas to look out for?

Looking forward to colors :-)
#2 Robin Skoglund on 2008-05-20 18:33 (Reply)
Honestly? the only gotcha we had with the actual switchover was figuring out how to activate the RAID1 array we have (tip: apt-get install mdadm). Other than that, it's very straightforward.
#2.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-05-21 14:35 (Reply)

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