Migration to Web Farm 2

Migrating Your Website to the New Southwest Cyberport Webfarm

Purpose

• Describe how to test your current site on the new Webfarm
• Encourage thorough testing of sites moving to the new Southwest Cyberport Webfarm
• List the upgraded software packages
• Provide a few suggestions to avoid common pitfalls.
• Encourage thorough testing. Really. You won't regret doing it. You will probably regret not doing it.

Testing Your Site

What to test

We cannot stress enough the importance of testing your site on the new webfarm. Do not just verify that your home page loads. Here is a partial list of behavior that should receive close scrutiny:

• Form submissions
  • Make sure your customers can reach you!
• Dynamic content generated by:
  • PHP code
  • CGI scripts
  • Apache Server Side Includes
  • Javascript
• Redirection (best used sparingly):
  • .htaccess, PHP, META tags, CGI, Javascript, etc.

Beware any hard-coded links (like <a href="http://www.YourDomain.com/otherfile.html">) - those will go to the current webfarm, rather than the new one.

Where to test

In most cases, we want to add the subdomain 'test' so that:

www.YourDomain.com => your site, via the current webfarm

test.YourDomain.com => your site, via the new webfarm

• If we control DNS for your domain:
  • We have already created the URL 'test.YourDomain.com' - use this URL to test your current site on the new webfarm. Let us know if this URL doesn't work.
  • When you're finished testing your site, send us an email instructing us to fully migrate your site to the new webfarm.
  • Test your site again, using 'www.YourDomain.com' rather than the test URL.

• If we do not control DNS for your domain:

Be careful when changing DNS entries for your domain.
Invalid DNS entries will make it impossible to reach your site.
These steps may not work for domains with multiple subdomains or other non-trivial DNS records

• For testing, we have created a URL for you to use that is similar to this:

test-yourdomain.swcp.com.

• Once you are finished testing, update all relevant A records to point to 216.184.2.32.

The files you are testing

The test URL points at exactly the same files as your main, live site. You do not need to upload anything. Anything that you want to change can be changed through your normal file upload method (FTP), but be aware that this will also change your live site. If this presents a problem and you need to work on a copy of your web site, let us know and we will set that up.

Hosting Environment Changes

	PHP Version	Apache Version	IP Address	SSL  IP Address
Current Webfarm	4.3	1.3	216.184.2.18	Note: SSL sites use different IP addresses.
New Webfarm	5.2	2.2	216.184.2.32

PHP Notes

• Register Globals
  • Register Globals is now disabled by default. We can enable it for your site at your request.
  • Questions? Please read PHP.net's description of Register Globals.
  • We strongly encourage our customers using Register Globals to consider refactoring their code at this time. Register Globals is deprecated and will be removed from PHP 6.

• Packages with Known Problems
  • Older versions of the PHP-Nuke CMS have a bug in the calendar module. Causes infinite loop when you access the calendar. Current version of PHP-Nuke is believed to be OK.
  • Older versions of the phpWebSite CMS have a bug in the calendar module (completely different from the PHP-Nuke problem). Causes infinite loop when you access the calendar. Current version of phpWebSite is believed to be OK.

Perl Notes

If you are using the CGI::Session library, and you are using a MySQL table to store session data, the table needs to be on a MySQL 5 server. If your database is currently on mysql.swcp.com, let us know and we can move your database to mysql5.swcp.com which is our MySQL 5 server. there might be other ramifications to this if you have other code which uses MySQL. There are a few compatibility between MySQL 4 and 5, but most of them are easily overcome.

Apache Notes

• .htaccess files
  • Though most .htaccess behavior will not be affected, all sites with .htaccess files should be tested.
  • The directive +FollowSymLinks needs to be changed to +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
  • The directive "Options All" worked on the old system but will cause an error on the new system.
    • Read Apache.org's description of this directive

MySQL Notes

Your MySQL databases are not affected by this change. The MySQL server you are currently using is still available using the same hostname, username, and password.

However, we do also have a newer MySQL server set up which we are working to migrate customers to. The old server (mysql.swcp.com) uses MySQL 4. The new server (mysql5.swcp.com) uses MySQL 5. If you have a database on the MySQL 4 server and would like to migrate it to the MySQL 5 server, let us know and we will copy your data to the new server.