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 &lta href="http://www.YourDomain.com/otherfile.html"&gt) - 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:

yourdomain.swcp.com.

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

The files you are testing

The test virtual 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.

Hosting Environment Changes

	PHP Version	Apache Version	IP Address
Current Webfarm	4.3	1.3	216.184.2.18
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.

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 changed to +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    • Read Apache.org's description of this directive