qmail

Trying to get qmail to work properly.  I've done two things.
(1) I changed the permissions on the qmail stuff per the following article:


# ls -la /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue*
-r-s--x--x 1 drweb qmail 161024 Oct 11 13:31 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue

Also I have turned mail off for the domains (which was advice I found somewhere else).

Gloucester moved over

Gloucester is fully moved over.  Tom has an FTP account (although sftp isn't working ... not sure why) and neither is calendar.gloucestersynchro.ca ... redirect doesn't seem to work.

gloucester half way

The gloucester registration site is moved over and so is the test site.

But I wanted to back things up before moving the main site over.  So far again the backup can not be deleted and cirrus is looking into it.  Once gloucester main is moved over, then we have to sort out two other things:

(1) why doesn't mail (qmail) work
(2) get the firewall in place.

The move over the winterfamily stuff.

latest backup deleted

Cirrus manually deleted the last backup and I created a new one.  In theory we are now ready for the big gloucester move.  I need to coordinate this with Tom.

new hardware

Site went down again today.  After looking into it, cirrus decided to relocate the VPS to new hardware.  hopefully things stabilize at this point.

more trouble?

On friday I requested that the backup be deleted so that I could take a backup with manotickbrass moved over and could start moving gloucestersynchro over.  They assigned this to a developer who I guess decided to not just delete the old backup but try to resolve the underlying issue.   At 5AM or so Plesk got upgraded.  Ticket is still open, but this AM the websites went down.  I requested help with a separate ticket and they are back again.  Not sure what is going on exactly.

manotick brass

OK, I have moved the manotick brass test and gallery sites.  Went pretty smoothly.  I'm using dropbox to move files to the server ... it's much faster than uploading myself.

Next step will be to move the remaining manotick brass stuff (music and core) ... and then backup ... and then play with firewall.

Firewall

I asked for help about how to to access the firewall settings.  They explained how to install it ... send link to plesk help.  I couldn't find the RPM file necessary, but when I went to modules, it was there.  I'm sure I didn't have it there before, so maybe cirrus just dropped it in when I asked.

Unfortunately it doesn't really work.  I can modify the mysql settings, but when I try toactivate I get an error.  The settings may be on (or maybe not).  I can't really tell yet.  They suggest playing with the iptables manually. I guess I'm going to have to figure out how this works.

manotickmusic.ca

manotickmusic.ca is now moved to the new server and mygiftideas.ca continues to run fine.   I am going to try to delete the old backup and start a new one.

cron to backup databases

Since entire db backups have restore issues, I'm setting up separate shell scripts for each database.  Use the following works well

mysqldump -u user -ppassword wishlist | gzip > /home/dbbackup/wishlist/wishlist_`date '+%m-%d-%Y'`.sql.gz
stored in /home/dbbackup

Container backup deletion failed

Container backup deletion failed (again), but the cirrus guys were quick to respond to my ticket and do it manually.  The creation of the new backup happened quickly.  I wish it would send email to let you know that it has stared / finished.

database restore -- oops

OK, so I figured out one mistake.  Backing up the entire database in one system and restoring it in another is a bad idea.  It clobbers tables that plesk uses (for example to track certificates) and after that your system is doomed.  Also, I though that using mysql -u user -ppassword dbname < fullbackup.sql would only take the stuff that pertained to dbname -- no such luck.  It restored everything (which is certainly not what I wanted).  I need to find a way to reduce the .sql file to just the one database before doing the restore (or restore from backups of the dbs done one at a time.

Upgrading CENTOS to PHP 5.3

After doing this wrong twice (and possibly introducing a root kit virus the first time), I've found out the right way to upgrade PHP and it is rather simple.

1) Run the following command to add the "YUM" Repository to your server:
   i)  rpm -ivh http://repo.webtatic.com/yum/centos/5/`uname -i`/webtatic-release-5-0.noarch.rpm
2) Update your current PHP by running the following which will also update all other php modules:
   ii)  yum --enablerepo=webtatic update php