The Occasional Occurence

If you are reading this, it means I successfully migrated dowski.com to my new server.

The whole server conversion wasn't too painful. I got my new VPS (Virtual Private Server) from VPSLand last Friday. I only had a few OS choices, none of them being Slackware, so I went with Debian (my other choices were Fedora Core, CentOS, Gentoo or RedHat 9). The server setup took about 36 hours, which seemed a bit long to me.

Debian Linux is pretty nice. I have messed with it a little bit in the past, but most of my experience with Linux has been on Slackware. I like apt-get for managing software and I think I'll like aptitude once I figure out why it sometimes lets me install stuff and doesn't other times.

Moving my blog was a breeze. I backed up my database with mysqldump, copied it to the new machine, ran "cat dbbackup.sql | mysql -p dbname", moved the Wordpress files, edited db username and password for the new machine, and setup a new virtual host in Apache 2. I also had to move my rewrite directives for pretty URLs. I am surprised that there hasn't been a syntax change between Apache 1.3 and 2.

Moving my projects site was super easy as well. The projects site runs Brockman, a CherryPy application I wrote. To move it, all I had to do was move the application directory, get the necessary Python modules installed, start the CP app server and proxy requests from Apache to the CP server.

For email, I decided to give Google's "hosted" Gmail a spin, so I'm not hosting my own email. That is actually kind of nice, because I get to keep my dowski.com email address but use all the great features of Gmail. It also takes some load off of my VPS, which only has 96MB of RAM allotted to it.

I am hosting my own DNS and got free secondary DNS from Twisted4Life. However, my domain registrar has a stupid control panel that is keeping me from using ns1.dowski.com as a nameserver. Thus, my DNS setup is not quite complete yet.

So there you have it. I'm sure there are going to be some "404 Not Found" casualties for some stuff, but hopefully I'll get it sorted out in the coming days and weeks.

cw