LincolnBlogs

Lately, I have been slowly migrating my server services from my ancient Thinkpad server to a VM on some real server hardware. This has been an arduous process, mostly because this is my own personal server, which means I am #1 strapped for time, #2 deprived of ambition when home and #3 insanely paranoid about screwing up any of my data.

I mentioned recently about how to set up a fakie mail server, which is what I have used for a long time. Well, oddly enough, the *new* portion of the server setup is quick, easy and works great. The hard part of that, which I didn’t mention on the previous post was data migration. You see, on the old server I used UW-IMAP and on the new one am using Dovecot IMAP. They both are set to use Maildir, so I just copied the folders from one machine to the other. Somewhere in there there is something funny in how each uses the folder structure. I noticed the problem immediately when using Alpine to get email from the server that it couldn’t find the previously configured folders. It turns out that I had to rename them to INBOX.foldername on the new system instead of just foldername and then things would mostly jive. I still had to make a few mail client tweaks, which were irritating, but hey, I got mail!

Once mail was running, I set out to get my webdav share working. That’s a pretty easy process and you can find a good instructable at http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-fedora-linux-apache-enable-webdav/. I have used webdav fileshares for quite some time now and really dig them despite the fact that it’s a crap shoot if such-and-such version of nautilus will work with them (/me grates teeth at nautilus). It still makes for good document portability.

I set up subversion (dav) as well. This is a must have for any coder of any kind and a great tutorial for this is at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Subversion. Once again, I pretty much copied my repo files from one machine to the other, and I even renamed the base repo on the way. Everything just worked and retained my logs and revision history, etc. Good stuff!

I installed LAMP on the server and moved over my intranet php code and databases and set up ntpd (a time server).

Lastly I installed bind on the new server so I can keep my dns going. That was a little bit more of a pain as the installs are *way* different between Ubuntu (old server) and CentOS (new one). CentOS uses a jailed instance, a different directory structure and a slightly different config setup as well. The tutorial at http://www.sanhom.com/?p=83 was invaluable at getting things going.

Whew, we are almost there! The only things I have left to do is setup my music server (GnuMP3d) and dhcp server, bothl of which are pretty much a piece of cake. After that I am ready for the momentous unplugging of the old machine 🙂

I wonder how Dann managed all this in just one night?! 🙂