Another day, another server migration

Sometimes I feel like all I do in my job and personal life is shuffle data around from one location to another. Last week it was re-installing Windows 7 on my two daily-use machines. This last weekend it was completing a server migration. Of course, I had just completed a migration 4 months ago.

To clarify, at the beginning of December I received an email from my hosting company letting me know that my VPS host was to be moved. At that point in time we were heavy into our project and I summarily ignored it. Not too long after that I got an email saying that my VPS had been replicated over to a new location and to check it out since I only had 3 days before they shut down the old server. Fun times, migrate all the data changes, make sure everything is functioning properly and then change the DNS. Not really a big deal but of course we were busier than hell with work.

A few weeks ago I warmed up a VPS with a new hosting provider. I wanted to play with Gallery 3 beta and the old VPS was running Ubuntu 8.04 with an old, old, old version of PHP. I had heard good things about this new company, and they offered Ubuntu 9.04, so I tried it out. In the end, I decided against using Gallery 3 and went over to SmugMug to host Snowulf Photography, but kept this new VPS. So I did yet another server migration (it feels like I do one every week) to this new setup.

All the sites I host have been moved and so far everything is working out. Really the only troublesome portion of a migration is dealing with MySQL. I exported everything from the old host which was running 5.0 (I believe) and the new one is running 5.1. They changed some of the setup in the `mysql` database, especially the `users` table which has caused some issues. In the end it got scraped and rebuilt by hand.

In the move I did some upgrades, like the blog software (Serendipity) and other minor fixes. So if you see something funny, odd, strange or generally broken, please let me know.