I’m really, really glad I went with renting a 2nd server and migrating to it instead of my original plan of just re-imaging. I would have been down for days while I figured out Ubuntu without Plesk.

I got my new server and pressed the magic button to have it re-imaged to Ubuntu 8.04. It all seemed to work just fine. I spent last Saturday going to town on it, getting the version of Subversion I wanted to use built, getting mod_wsgi built, and other simple “new server” type tasks. But then I noticed that the following on Sunday:

/dev/md6              4.7G  228M  4.5G   5% /var
/dev/md7              221G   83M  221G   1% /home

The sizes of /var and /home were swapped compared to the old server. I had a huge /var and a small /home before. I became very worried because on the old server, all the databases, website data, and logs all go under /var. Was I going to run out of room very quickly?

I stewed on this for a day or so, and I even toyed with the idea of reimaging to CentOS 5 and getting Plesk back. After all, my main goal was to get Python 2.5, and I subsequently learned you can run different versions of Python side by side. So in theory I could install Python 2.5 on CentOS if I built from source. Then I could tell mod_wsgi to use Python 2.5, meanwhile the rest of the system would still use Python 2.4, and things like the yum package manager would keep working.

But ultimately I decided I liked Ubuntu better. I liked the way they setup Apache for easy multiple virtual hosts. I liked the aptitude program as a simple GUI for apt-get. And Ubuntu is my development environment on my laptop, so having them both match would be a good thing.

I did ask my host if they could either customize the image to make /var bigger or help me do it. They said no to both. This wasn’t totally surprising or unexpected.

I decided it didn’t matter how big /var was. I’ll just put everything on /home, under a directory of my own making. I configured MySQL to use the new directory on /home, and all my virtual host websites will use it as well. Now only system logs will use /var, and it should be big enough for them.

With that settled I set of to try to make it work. I began moving deathofagremmie.com to the new server. Moving the database and WordPress files was easy enough. I then hacked my way through the DNS configuration, using the old server as a guide. I really wasn’t sure I had done it right, but what the heck, I thought I’d give it a try. I then had my host transfer the domain to the new server. There wasn’t much to do except wait for the DNS to propogate. I did this late at night, so I went to bed. The next day at work I noticed that it had transferred, and the website even came up! A few things didn’t work, but nothing I couldn’t fix at home later. But when I came home from work, DNS was still pointing to the old server. I had to wait until almost 24 hours had elapsed before it finally updated for me at home.

Once DNS was correct, I could more easily fix the problems from the migration. It turns out they were minor. I had copy/pasted some Apache configuration from the default files, and I had the “AllowOverride” option set to “none” on my virtual host. This meant Apache would not look for .htaccess files, and thus the mod_rewrite rules that WordPress uses weren’t working, and the authorization I had setup on the admin login was busted. No problem, I’d actually rather not have Apache look for .htaccess files for efficiency reasons. I just moved those directives out of .htacess and put them into my configuration file for the virtual host. Why didn’t I think of that before? But that wasn’t quite the whole story. Mod_rewrite still didn’t work, but that was only because it wasn’t enabled by default in Ubuntu. The Ubuntu team did a really good job of paring down the Apache configuration, and making it very easy to enable and disable modules. A simple “a2enmod” command and a graceful restart fixed it. The Ubuntu Server Guide was a great help to me while I was doing all this.

And yesterday I received my copy of Pro DNS and Bind by Ron Aitchison. By quickly reading the first few chapters the mystery around those DNS files was suddenly solved. I went back and redid those files with my new knowledge and I feel confident about them now. I highly recommend this book.

And, using my new copy of The Book of Postfix, I was able to get my mail aliases for deathofagremmie.com to work. Postfix was much easier to setup than I thought it would be. The developers did a great job of “just making it work” out of the box with minimal configuration. I don’t have any plans to have any real mailboxes on the server, I just want aliases to forward to my Google mail account. This was easy to setup, and is described in Chapter 14 “A Mail Server For Multiple Domains.” I used the virtual alias technique to accomplish this. Edit a few files, run some commands on them, restart and it all worked.

The last wrinkle of the night was figuring out how to change the hostname under Ubuntu. This was solved by doing some quick Googling. You basically have to edit /etc/hostname, /etc/hosts, then stop and start the hostname service. With that fixed, email from my new server looks correct.

So, what’s left? I’m liking this new configuration, so I think I’ll go with it. Now I have to move the two remaining sites: one is a Django powered site, and one is the current PHP based SurfGuitar101.com. After I get them moved and tested I can shut down the old server, and get back to working on the new Django powered version of SurfGuitar101.com.