Migration of directadmin.com to new server

Hello,

Just letting everyone know that the directadmin.com server is starting to show signs of aging (if anyone didn't notice the up/down nature today). We are migrating to a new box. The forum database is already on the new box (you're using it), but the /clients section of the licensing system will be shut off for now, as it's only local. The new box should be running sometime tonight.

John

This is now the new box, there were a few minor routing issues and ARP delays (hence the downtime), but it should be fine now.

John

I did notice that some post are lost, am i wrong?

Today i did have many thread as "unread" for new post, with post i actually did read yesterday, and, some replies seems to be missing.

Well, no much pain, just a notice

Regards

It's more than likely some posts were lost, as there will always be a window of time during the backup/restore where posts are made to the old DB are not in the backup.
The host change was not done until the new DB was up and running.

John

This is always a problem with moving user-input driven sites. The way we do it for our clients is:

We use a new IP# (short 600 second TTL). This works for us because we do not serve DNS from the DirectAdmin servers; we instead use separate DNS servers, and our DirectAdmin servers as hidden masters.

First we backup the site on the old server, and move it to the new server. We delete the DNS on the new server as soon as it's set up, since we can't tell DirectAdmin to not move it over. So DNS continues to be served from our public authoritative DNS servers, using the information in the hidden master zone on the old server.

Then we do any testing, usually necessary only if versions have changed between servers, to make sure site works on the new server (we use local zone file to make sure we're looking at the new server).

When we're certain site will work on the new server we do shut down the site for a short period of time; suspend it on both servers. Then move the database and email store only to the new server, restore the DNS on the new server, and delete it from the old server, so that our real DNS servers will pick up zone from the new hidden master.

At that point anyone still seeing the DNS from the old server will see a suspended site, everyone else will start seeing the new server from the new hidden master within no more than 30 minutes (it may take up to 30 minutes for our hidden masters to synchronize to our main authoritative DNS. So after 30 minutes we unsuspend the site on the old server, to allow any email stuck on origination servers to finally be received on old server.

Then approximately five hours later we move email one more time. This will result in no email being lost and some duplicates, which is what clients appear to prefer to some email being lost.

Then immediately thereafter we suspend the site on the old server for the last time. We then remove the line for the domain from our local hosts file.

In our case if possible we continue to leave the site suspended on the old server for up to one month, in case we need to find some files for some reason.

This works well for us, though your mileage may vary. We do this for our clients, and under contract for anyone who needs our help.

Note, for what it's worth, when I logged in this morning I saw only a few new posts; much less than I usually see.

Jeff