Running on Sonic

A bit of downtime this morning as we migrated the main birdhouse systems over from a Darwin server at Cliq to a RedHat server at Sonic’s data center. A few unanticipated glitches: DNS did some really weird stuff where some servers were caching [hostname].birdhouse.org but not birdhouse.org. Of course I thought my Apache configuration was to blame, so spent time chasing red herrings. The new server runs Apache 2 rather than 1.x, and some of the directives have changed. Got caught off guard when some of the old syntax halted httpd on launch. More fiddling.

Also upgraded MySQL from 3.23 to 4.0 (transactions!) and upped CommuniGate and SpamAssassin while I was at it.

Things are settling down nicely now. I’m not exactly thrilled to move from Darwin to Linux. Ultimately it’s not much different – Unix is Unix, in a sense – but there are pride and comfort factors. But there are also advantages, such as the fact that many control panel and billing systems are built expressly for Linux (though I’m still using WebMin, some home-brew shell scripts, and a homemade PHP/MySQL billing system).

The new server has around 4x – 5x more CPU than the old one, which has greatly sped up MT and other hungry processes.

More tweaking to do… then I’ll bring over the customer accounts.

Music: Public Image Limited :: Radio 4

2 Replies to “Running on Sonic”

  1. interesting. i was wondering why spam filtering suddenly became *less* effective…. i say downgrade. it was working better. (for me anyway).

  2. I think I know why – turns out the old bayes databases were not compatible with the new SA. I just blew away the old ones this morning and we’re now building new ones. Give it a few days to get better again.

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