Moving sites to new hardware

[matt neuburg]

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 09:21:39 -0700, Samuel Reynolds <sam at spinwardstars.com> said:

>>This question is also posted on the Frontier discussion board. I'm 
>>hoping there's a clean way to deal with a big  problem I've encountered. 
>>I need to move my Frontier/Manila software to new hardware that has a 
>>partitioning scheme different than the old hardware. My Manila sites 
>>don't work on the new hardware because there seem to be absolute 
>>pathnames *everywhere* in the databases. Leaving aside for the moment 
>>the fact that this seems like an almost unbelievably bad design, how can 
>>this be fixed? Changing the partitioning of the hardware just to suit 
>>this particular application is not feasible in this case. What I really 
>>want is to configure Manila to use relative paths, but I don't see a way 
>>to do that. Does anyone have any advice?

>I just did this for a client. The software was
>moved to a new server, with a new domain name,
>a new machine name, and new disk and directory
>names.
>
>The base domain name had to be changed manually in
>config.manila.prefs. I did a manual search-and-replace
>of the old URLs in manila.root, mainresponder.root,
>config.root, etc. Took about 3 hours.

Once you have a list of all the places where absolutely pathnames are saved in the database it is easy to write a script that changes them all. That takes 3 seconds, not 3 hours. I have such a script, and it runs on startup; if there's a problem, it asks me for instructions, I give them, it adjusts all the pathnames, and away we go. The only problem is that my attempts to automate this process *completely* - that is, to detect automatically exactly how much of each pathname is wrong - have never quite succeeded; thus human intervention is necessary. That, of course, might not be acceptable (because one might move one's copy of Frontier to a remote machine). m.

matt neuburg, phd = matt at tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
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