The Joys of taking over an existing server

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

We still don't know why the one server is crashing [1]. It went down three times today (well, technically Sunday as it's now 1:30 am Monday morning as I type this) and nothing was visible on the screen because Linux probably has some setting deep in the kernel to blank the screen after umpteen minutes of inactivity so the cause of the problems are never seen. That is, if anything at all is written to the console when the machine crashes (or just prior actually).

So I was tasked with moving the websites (some 1,000) off the dying server onto a backup server, but I couldn't start until I got home at around 10:00 pm. I didn't think it would be all that bad; rsync is your friend and all that. I was hoping this wouldn't take more than an hour since I have to be up and ready to go by 9:00 am Monday morning (this morning).

So why am I still up at 1:30 am?

Because the backup server is not configured exactly like the primary server. You see, there are over 1,000 accounts (one for each website) on the primary machine, and only about 150 on the secondary machine. To make matters worse, there are some accounts on both, but their numeric ids don't match! (with the upshot that files won't be assigned their correct owners)

Lovely!

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

“This will be a great job once I get these servers configured correctly.”

[1] /boston/2003/12/04.2

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