The Big Move: Parts II and III

I anticipate that the next two steps of moving Club Troppo to its new home will take place today. I’ve copied the files and database as of about 10 minutes ago to the new site, and in a few moments I’ll be asking the current host to redelegate the DNS for clubtroppo.com.au

What does this mean? Disruption! Club Troppo may not be accessible or only partly accessible for some of you for some time, but it’s unlikely to be more than a few hours.

In order to minimise the disappointment of not having comments move from old host to new host, I’d ask everyone to hold off for the moment, and I’ll be freezing some of the posting / comments things where possible.

Thanks everyone for your patience at this time!

ADDITIONAL: You can go straight to the new site through this temporary link address.

UPDATE 2pm CST: The transfer is still in progress. Currently I am talking to the new host about the database transfer, as we have so many comments it proves difficult to actually import them all in one go. This means that the comments are broken for now.

Oh, one other thing, the old host is now automatically redirecting to the temporary address until DNS is properly propagated. Thanks everyone.

UPDATE 4pm: Database tribulations are occupying most of my attention at the moment, in particular the curious mystery of why all our apostrophes have gone wonky. I suspect character set troubles. The site may go up and down a few times in the next couple of hours, sorry.

UPDATE 5pm: Looks like DNS reallocation is well underway, with things failing in all sorts of exciting ways. It should come good in a few hours.

UPDATE 30 Jan 12pm: It looks like DNS has fully propagated and that everything is working. There is an outstanding problem with old apostrophes being turned into various symbols – this seems to be due to the old server storing everything in a swedish character set. I’ll be looking for a way to neaten that up, but for now everything seems to be working.

Welcome back Club Troppo!

10 thoughts on “The Big Move: Parts II and III”

comments back

congrats

I hope you have compiled a HOWTO for others

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Open ID is in a very bad mood for me. Not working right

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Three cheers for Jacques

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FXH;

I used the standard instructions for moving the site across. I had two problems which were fairly specific:

1. The large size of the Troppo database, and
2. DNS troubles

The Troppo database is about 80MB (edit: actually closed to 50MB) altogether, but the comments table by itself is around 45MB (edit: 30MB) of the total. None of the recommended ways to migrate a DB work as-is due to the size of those tables: the new-to-2.1 feature (XML import/export) only works up to a total of 10MB, and most hosts (including Dreamhost) are configured to reject SQL INSERT statements over 16MB.

In the end I manually split up large table INSERTs by hand and ran them one by one. That seems to have done the trick.

The DNS troubles mostly came about because our old host turned off the old site shortly after transferring DNS authority. Due to DNS propogation delays this meant that some people couldn’t see the site for up to 24 hours. It was a bit galling because I set up a 302 redirect on the old server to a temporary mirror in order to smooth things over, but it was no good once the old hosting account go switched off.

Can you tell me what OpenID is doing wrong?

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The other thing I should add is character set weirdness. I’ve been trying to use manual UPDATE queries to fix them, but it doesn’t always work according to plan. The old database was stored as latin1-swedish, the new database is serving UTF-8. That’d be hunky dorey if they agreed on symbols at all. Some things I’ve been able to fix, some are not coming to the fix-it party.

If any of the authors are reading this and see symbols that are incorrect, can you email me both the incorrect symbol and the correct symbol that should appear there? Along with a link to the offending post of course.

Should all be OK from here out though.

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