[ic] Moving my store

[Chris Wenham]

On Wednesday 26 February 2003 12:49 pm, Stephen Kent wrote:
> The server which hosts my Interchange store is quickly ailing.  It is
> outdated and we were planning on replacing it soon.  The crazy sounds
> coming from the HD have made soon = now.  I also want to switch OSs from
> Mandrake to RedHat.  My question is.  What is the most painless way to
> move my store from one server to another?

 First, back up your catalog directory and httpd document root immediately. If 
you're using a SQL database, dump it to a restorable file and back that up 
before you even back up the catalog, since it's going to be a higher 
priority.

 If the hard drive is really borked, I have a little bit of experience with 
yanking data off a drive that's near death. I did this on FreeBSD, but I 
think it should work on Linux as well. You pretty much do an image copy of 
the failing hard drive directly from the Unix device name with dd, like this:

 dd if=/dev/your_partition conv=noerror | ssh yourlogin@backup.server.com dd 
of=disk_image.dat

 That example pipes the raw disk image over SSH to another computer with a 
good hard drive. You just need to change /dev/your_partition to /dev/da0s1a 
or whatever the device of the failing partition is (you'll find it with the 
"mount" command).

 I use this if the failure has progressed to the point where the OS can't read 
the filesystem anymore, but the drive isn't completely dead yet. Once it's on 
your backup server, you should be able to mount the image file as if it was a 
real drive and just copy your catalog files off it. On FreeBSD I use vnconfig 
to create a virtual mount, but I think it's different for Linux.

 It's my opinion that even if you think the drive still has enough hours left 
in it to do a regular copy, I'd want to grab an image file anyway, just to 
help me sleep at night.

 Once your data is somewhere safe, I'd then review the documentation for 
moving a store from a test server to a production server, since the same 
principles will apply:

 http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/doc/wiki/FaqHowDoIMoveACatalogFromATest.html

 It's pretty much just a case of installing Interchange on the new server, 
copying the catalog directory to its new permanent location, making sure the 
symlinks and permissions are set up right, then adding the catalog's line to 
interchange.cfg.

Regards,

Chris Wenham