I moved servers for this site, again. This morning I just thought, “might as well I have 30 minutes”.
So I rsynced my files over to the (mt) server, setup the config file to look connect to the old server’s db, changed IPs in godaddy, then after church I came home and dumped the db and imported it on my new server, changed the config file to look locally and viola!.
It’s pretty basic and I’ve got it down to a science since I’ve moved this site over 10 times in the last 4 years.
Why did I leave the grid server? There were just too many times the site went down for 2-3 minutes and sometimes was just very slow to respond. Most importantly, the benefits I get from the grid from having my client websites there I was not getting on my blog site. Those benefits being: the ability for the client to manage their site easier.
So, not a big deal but I thought I should post about it since I really needed to blog about something. And if you see any performance boosts, it’s because of the (dv) server change.
aside:
Media Temple’s (dv) plans are great, a little pricey but they’re worth it. Bandwidth and performance are exceptional. They also let you pretty much do anything you want, unlike other VPS hosts.
Woke up this morning to a bunch of pingdom emails stating my site has been down. Turns out there’s either a security vulnerability with WP 2.7 or one of my plugins since my options table went from a few megs to over 2 gigs.
The excess size caused mysql to sh*% itself.
I can’t research the issue, since (mt) has locked the table and is researching the issue right now.
All I could do is recover a backup from an old backup to a new db then import the missing posts from the offending db. There’s still some quirks, like comments but it looks like intense debate figured out what to do there.
I’ll update this post when I figure this out. I sure hope it’s some bad code from a recent plugin update rather than a security issue. Regardless, I’ll need to look into this further.
I just moved all of my sites off my (mt) dedicated virtual in order to get things straightened out. If you notice any performance issues, which you probably wont since you’re reading this in Google Reader, please tell me. I’m currently just on the (mt) grid. Yes, back on the (mt) grid after all that bickering before.
My master plan is to wash the (dv) clean, start out using plesk and see how far I go. I want to install redmine first and get all my repositories setup straight before I make the move back.
One thing I have to get working is the auto update functionality on my own server, since the latest WP update I’ve had problems getting it to work but determined it was the result of me locking down my server a little too much. But since I’m on the grid, it just works perfect and I can now see why it’s such a killer feature, since I just updated all of my plugins in minutes and downloaded a installed a few more without having to use s/ftp.
I’m still contemplating moving everything back, especially if the grid lives up to my expectations there would be no reason to move back any of the sites I manage – including this one
This somewhat requires you’ve followed my suggestions on not committing yourself to a certain host or your own DNS or mail servers, if not the extra steps might take you 10 more minutes, maybe days.
There are plenty of ways to migrate to a new server depending on how you’ve setup the server or your host, these are just to show the simplicity of my migrations after following the post linked above.
Step 1:
Rsync your other server’s files to the new one.
SSH into your new box and run rsync to connect to the old machine through ssh. It’s going to pull over every file to the new host that you specify.
rsync -avz -e ssh root@[OLD MACHINE IP]:/home /
example
rsync -avz -e ssh root@64.13.227.XX:/home /
This is probably the most important time saver, it will help dramatically in a planned migration since you can run this multiple times after the initial sync. The purpose of rsync is that it will only pull over changed files since the initial rsync.
Step 2.
Run a mysqldump your DB and either use scp to grab the file from your old host or use wget after placing the dump in an accessible place on your webserver. Then just import it after receiving it on the new host.
Step 3.
For people running their own server you’ll now just need to reconfigure apache, which shouldn’t take long since there will only be slight changes in the new httpd.conf file.
There has already been a long debate about hosting your own DNS servers and mail servers but I’ve found once again relying on Godaddy total DNS management and using GoDaddy e-mail forwarding has made my three migrations over the last year a breeze. So I suggest to everyone:
Suggestion One:
Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.
For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.
This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.
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I’ve completely neglected this site over the last week or two and I’m disappointed I completely brok my goal of posting every day. And it’s not that I don’t have much to post about either; I bought an iPhone, I’ve got a lot of tutorials for CentOS on Media Temples (dv) plan, I moved off of Trac and went with Warehouse for all my repos and there are some great projects I’m working on mostly all on Wordpress. There’s just so much for me to type and review. Even today, I’m using the Grid from (mt) again for a client, the same client that allowed me to spend money on a Xacti HD2 from eBay and a Casio SD7500 I just came home with from Circuit City, so I hope I catch up and when I do it shouldn’t stop again.
I have to if I intend to keep pushing the revenue I get through this site into gadget reviews and hosting tutorials.
Since I have such an elaberate setup for email:
The iPhone allows for makes setting up e-mail so easy for a normal GMail account, even Google Apps accounts work through the basic “GMail” setup but there are a few problems:
One problem just creates the other for me, since I could always just use pop for the GA account the reply to would be setup correctly but I would be getting too much e-mail–including a double of my work e-mail–(since I have IMAP setup for work on another account on the iPhone) so a filter is necessary.
Also a lot of people might want to change that “From:” address if using one of the other methods of e-mail accounts on the iPhone.
Filtering:
From/Reply-to change:
On the iPhone create an “other” e-mail account, the type will be POP3.
Settings>Mail>Add Account>Other
Choose “Pop” out of IMAP, POP and Exchange buttons.
For the “Account Information” give your real “Name” and for your “Address” give the FROM address you really want to use. The key here is that you can now specify a FROM “Address” which is NOT defaulted to your Yahoo!, GMail or AIM account.
I host a lot of wordpress sites for friends, family and business and one thing I’ve noticed is the collection of spam on some of these sites because they either don’t want to use the provided spam plugins, don’t maintain the plugins or just simply don’t care about their blog anymore.
Something I do regularly on my site but neglected to run on the other sites is running a SQL to delete the comments marked as spam in the comments table.
Instructions:
Open up PHPMyAdmin. After selecting your DB on the left click “SQL”,
The SQL to enter should be,
DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ’spam’
If you’re like me I and changed the default table prefix (highlighted above) from wp_ just change the SQL with the correct prefix for your table.
Then click “GO”.
After you’ll be greeted with this informational dialog. 43K comments is ridiculous and will slow down your db.
You’re not done yet, click structure and optimize your tables to get rid of the overhead.
One of the first things I did on my Media Tempe (dv) was install webmin because I’m a huge fan of easy it let’s you manage your web/server, e.g. web interface to quickly change config files or restart particular services without having to login through SSH.
A more official description:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.
Add the following section to /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Install GPG key/signature by running
# rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
Run
# yum install webmin
Your webmin should now be available at
http://your.ip.address:10000/
or
https://your.ip.address:10000/
and you can login using your root account.
I would highly recommend the stressfree theme for webmin, it makes it much easier to navigate. Also, Virtualmin is a must if you manage a lot of domains, it “supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail or Postfix”.
After finally setting up Trac and SVN on my new server I’ve moved all my projects off Google Code hosting. But instead of checking in all of the code to the new repositories I updated all of the theme and plugin pages. So the problem, you’ll not be able to download anything until tonight when I get around to updating the repositories. Unless you just want to head over to GCode (link above) where all the latest versions are, plugins don’t count.
Currently I’m planning to keep all of my plugins on extend but if it’s a major plugin like Search Everything I’m making a trac project to make it easier to manage. I’ll be able to do betas there too. Linking plugins to wordpress.org’s extend is almost a requirement now if you want any kind of good exposure or you want to be involved with automatic plugin updates whenever wordpress roles that feature out.
All of my themes will have it’s very own trac project, e.g. iScattered. I had thought Google Code was going to work best but after all the work of getting trac and svn installed and thinking about manageability of two project homes I deleted had to break off of GC.
This whole week I wanted to post about each theme; describing what changed or didn’t change, a showcase almost while updating their project homes and pages at the same time but it didn’t work out since I had to migrate servers Tuesday. I’m going to push it off, hopefully next week will work out but either way the code will be up soon and if you can’t wait just go here.
