Migrating Site to New Server

Migrating an elgg website to a new server.. ?  Might be not as straight-forward as it seems.
We've seen migrations of site with 50 members cause headaches, a few hundred members ? bigger headaches ! 29,000 members ?? horrendous task ! Add to the situation the fact that your new server uses a different control panel  (Plesk in our case) -- one had better be comfortable with linux line commands and know the structure of the file system that supports apache, php, vhosts. ps: backups still running from yesterday ;-)  why did those pesky kids upload so much data ? lolz ! I will try to do a technical analysis later if there is interest ;-)

  • All 3 sites are up on new server..
    hit 32,000 + 1000 ++ @ actual migrate time ;-(
    in between MJ and ME getting s-o-o- dwunk (red red wine & warm english beer..) while coding
    RSync SED, GREP, SU, CHOWN, PLESK, Bitvise, puTTY, (PhpMyAdmin) were bootiful to us..
    We're glad we spent some time planning..
    things went as planned..
    a few minor hiccups.
    but kiddies are hwappi ;)
    ackshully new registerations even as we were migrating lolz...
    Now we party for 30 hrs B4 next phase..
    all those luvly security / safety traps we planning...
    MMO/RPG's etc the babies are cryin for;;;;

  • Well Just to give a sequence of events

    Dhrup spent a bit of time planning as the biggest concern was that we where running a live very active site and we would have to Shut down the DB during the move. This was done during the time we changed the DNS, we figured that we had a very minimum time of 2 hrs for the propagation to take effect.

    Big D had moved the bulk of the Data folder and the DB over before hand, (no small job as it was over 14 gigs) Big D pulled the plug on the old server I Changed the DNS\ It was now a race to get the old DB and Data folders resinqued before the dns propagated. This turned out to be very minor as Big D had it completely sinqued within about half an hour We then spent our time refreshing our pages waiting for the the DNS to resolve.

    When it resolved for me (UK) about 3 hours later I signed in and found people already in the site blissfully unaware that anything had happend Big D could not get into the site for another 5 hours or so as Virginia didn't resolve to probably one of the last places. The site was up all the Data was there and by the time big D got in we had had over 50 new registrations and there where 30 people online.

    Seamless not quite. We had a few problems but Big D's detective work and his knowledge of Elgg and Apache got us to the fixes Our major headaches where mostly encountered with the differences with control panels on the two different servers however B.D. worked mostly at command level so it didn't bother him as much.

    All in all the sites are moved and working better 

    first the test site

    2n'd the small production site (1000 members)

    3rd http://fbfkids.com 32,000 members all up and running and working 100% correct :-)

    The credit for the accuracy and seemlessness of the move should go to Dhrup as his skill, knowledge, and detective work at this level are quite amazing.

     

  • oopsie ;-(  así que me mintió .. a los niños demostrar que soy incorrecto de nuevo ... 33.000..!

  • http://trac.fbfworld.com/ now keeps track of problems, issues, features...;-)

  • yepperz.. 'tis funn ==> server crashed a few days after we had just just finished the migration ;-(
    could not even connect thru SSH ! got thru on serial console to the machine and.. had to backup the data, etc, fdisk'ed the whole danged sdaX's (-> formatted the 400GB disk lolz) reinstall CentOS, re-image e-v-e-r-y-thing, recreate all accounts, databases etc, install Elgg, dropped the backup DB FRM MYI MYD into var/lib/mysql, dropped the backup elgg/code/ back and... we're alive once again... whew;;;;;;-)

  • Users: 34162

    I guess we kinda under-estimated ?

  • (1)    migrated OK
    (2)    CentOS box died on us abt 1 wk later
    (3)    Recreated da whole dang shebang server
    (4)    back on track.... now !

    36/K kids screaming.... at us now...

  • Hmm old post, since 64 days users seem to have grown to 50153 screaming kids ;;;

  • OK So I "lied" ! It's actually ⅀54,788 right now via our real-time site-monitoring script ;-)

    I have noticed some other posts elsewhere from people having problems when they try to migrate their sites from one server to another.

    I do not quite follow why others have have so many horrendous problems ! yes, one catch is - when we performed our last server migration - about 29,000 users and *all related content, etc.. **everything ! - we did spend about 2 weeks 16x7 *planning* before the actual migration - which was finished in about 3 hours for about 15-20 GB of data.. no problems ;-P