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Server Migration
I was reading Sam Curran’s blog and he was talking about intelligent server migration. This, of course, is interesting to me since I just got done doing the same thing. Sam had a more difficult situation in that he has users to make changes to the database. While that’s true on a blog with comments, it wasn’t a huge concern to me over a weekend.
Dealing with DNS really is the biggest problem. It took almost 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate to the point where the old server was done taking traffic. I think next time, if possible, I’ll just switch the IP address on the server.
The biggest challenge I faced was moving to a 64-bit processor. I started out loading up Fedora Core 6 for 64-bit processors and trying to follow my instructions for setting up a Linux server. In particular, building the LAMP stack turned out to be a nightmare. Nothing impossible, but with the mental bandwidth I had to give it, I staled for 2 months.
Finally, I just loaded the 32-but version of the OS on the machine and everything fell into place. I was up and running in a few hours. I gave up some performance (how much?) for the fact of getting it done. The new server is performing well and has given a big performance boost to the compute intensive tasks like rebuilding pages and searching).
Posted by windley on March 15, 2007 12:03 PM
Comment from Joshua Barratt at March 15, 2007 12:34 PM
Re: the DNS updates -- if you lower the TTL on your zone (to something small, like 5 or 10 minutes) then it stops all the upstream DNS's from caching it any longer than that. You can then do your "cutover" and have the impact felt almost immediately. We do this for our customers automatically when they're hopping from one product to another, and it's remarkably successful.
Comment from Phil Windey at March 15, 2007 3:43 PM
Yes, setting the TTL low is a good solution--if you have control of the actual zone files rather than using a service to manage your DNS. I keep my DNS records at Verio and as far as I know, there's no way to control the TTL.
Comment from Carl Youngblood at March 17, 2007 11:27 PM
64-bit ubuntu server was really easy to set up. You might want to try that.
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