Thursday saw the physical installation of the new wired server. After a lot of huffing and puffing (I tell you that thing was *heavy*), it's all wired in and networked.
A few points about the new server. It's far more powerful than the current/old server. Also, we're making use of Xen virtualisation. There are many arguments for this approach, including the ability to pull a virtual machine if something goes bad. There's also the flip side - more complicated administration.
A decision has been made to make the transition between the old and new server progressive. So, we launch the new service one at a time. This should reduce the problems we run into and allows the services to continue to be used until the new ones are ready.
One example is the database migration. We run both a mysql and a postgresql server. So far only the mysql server has been migrated. The process was simple, get mysql to dump everything (that includes using the --all-databases flag) and them import it into the new server. Once this was completed, we took the old server offline and updated the hosts file on our server. This was done as the hosts file was ponting the aliases to the old server not the new server as our DNS server is. Once the entries were removed, we fell back on the DNS server and the new server was providing the data.
This kept most things working except for those pointing to the old server directly. These have now mostly been updated and are working again.
Wired is not the only server I have been bringing online. I have also been working on my own family server (steelehost.dyndns.org). This is acting as a web, file, backup and proxy server. The proxy part may sound a bit odd for a family but it is running squid and ad removal. No annoying adverts! However, the downside is the ad removal can be a little overzelous. Some corporate websites have the banners replaced with "this ad has been zapped". I'll post a screenshot soon on that one.
The plan is to eventually get subversion on the server and use it for various personal software projects.
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