Category: Geekery

Getting there…

My IP block has been delisted by SpamHaus. Unfortunately, in spite of the “R” in “RBL” standing for “Real-time”, apparently some ISPs cache their copy of the SpamHaus RBL and are still blocking me. Hopefully normal service will be restored eventually. My outgoing mail queue has gone from 120 to 85, so I guess some ISPs are updating their caches.

I also discovered that evidently you can’t just rsync your whole mail spool area over to a new system because postfix somehow ties the spool file names to the inodes they’re on or something. I was getting strange errors like fatal: lock file defer B99792602A5: Resource temporarily unavailable until I did a “postfix check”, and it said something about renaming files, and now everything is happy again.

Migration accomplished!

I’ve shutdown all three domUs on the old server and brought them up on the new server. So far, I’ve fixed a small issue with MySQL not starting up, which kept some of the web sites from starting up. But email appears to be flowing, the blog is up, news is up. Now to go through all the other services that should be running and make sure they are.

Upgrades, Updates

I upgraded WordPress to 3.0, and to celebrate I switched to the new theme. I’m going to to want to replace that banner picture at some point, but otherwise I think it went ok.

I “racked” my new colo box at LogicalSolutions.net/RackWire.com. Of course the first thing I did when I got home was discover that I had 15 un-installed security upgrades, including the kernels. Oh oh. I went ahead and upgraded, in spite of the nagging voice telling me that this didn’t go well last time. And the first thing I discovered that when it upgraded the kernels, it didn’t keep all the tweaked settings I had in /boot/grub/menu.lst, not even in menu.lst~. I also discovered that when I backed up the system before I brought it over to the facility, I only backed up the root partition, not /boot. Dammit. I’m currently rsyncing some files from the old box to the new one, but when that’s done, I’m going to reboot the new one, and cross my fingers and hope it will work. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll see how well LogicalSolutions takes to me visiting my box for a few hours tomorrow.

Update: I rebooted my box with the new kernel and it actually booted! Hurrah!

More colo box setup

On the new box:

  • Boot it up
  • Shut down all three domUs with “xm shutdown”
  • Mount all three domU disks in /mnt/xen[1-3]

On the old box:

  • Set up an authorized key so that root on the new box can ssh into root on the old box
  • Make a snapshot of one of the disks with lvcreate -L 100G -s -n xen1-snapshot /dev/xen-space/xen1-disk
  • Mount it with mount /dev/xen-space/xen1-snapshot /mnt/xen1

On the new box:

  • Copy the changed files using rsync -aSuvrx --numeric-ids --delete -e ssh --exclude /lib/modules root@xen.xcski.com:/mnt/xen1/ /mnt/xen1

On the old box:

  • Unmount the snapshot
  • Remove the snapshot with lvremove /dev/xen-space/xen1-snapshot