Server Move

Well, after a couple of very long and frustrating evenings, I’ve finally managed to replicate the setup of my old, decrepit server onto a shiny new (and hopefully more reliable) dell box. I thought that this would be easy, as I was under the impression that I had everything under version control. But it’s only when you start on an endeavour like this that you realise just how much tweaking you have done to a box. Some particular highlights of this move:

• I had been installing my squid.conf to the wrong place for about 2 years.
• I discovered I’d been running clamscan (command line) instead of calling clamd (daemon) for a year. Slow mail ‘r’ us.
• I discovered that my PostgreSQL backups had not been running for over a year.
• I noticed that my trac installation had been wikispammed a few days ago (I didn’t notice when it happened). Trac needs a “revert to previous version” button.
• Rails has caused me the most grief, surprisingly. getting typo up and running has been a pain. Firstly, because I didn’t have FastCGI installed. But I didn’t get an error for some reason. But whe I did install it, all I got was “FastCGI: incomplete headers (35 bytes) received from server”. I have now learned that this means “something went wrong but I’m not going to tell you what is. In my case, it was needing to install the ruby-postgres drivers. But rails isn’t kind enough to tell you that it can’t load the db drivers you’ve requested, instead it just silently fails. Which is a bit of a nuisance. I’ll have to check the trunk to see if it’s been fixed…

Anyway, now I can finally get on with the other more important tasks that I have to do. I gave up being a sysadmin 5 years ago for a damned good reason.