Moving from one server to another. Slight problem, could use help.

[wmarcy]

I am moving from one 2010 Mac Pro to a brand spanking new Mac Pro (quad, 32gbs of ram, 20 tb's of disk space). Old machine is running 10.6.8 server, new is running 10.8 server. These are physically located in my office, I have a t1 line feeding them bandwidth.

I have prepped the new server, all apache mods that were running on the old machine are running on the new machine, php is the same version, Mysql is the same version.

I have copied over the ip.board subdirectory to the document root folder, and fixed whatever permissions errors I had.

Exported the mysql database, then imported it into the new box.

Initially I could not log in at all, eventually I got it so I could login, but had to turn off all hooks, which is ok, I can go through all the hooks one by one to find the offending culprit.

Main problem I am having is that the only place I can not access in ACP is Cache management. It only returns a white screen, nothing in the apache error log.

Any ideas or tips? Is there stuff I can delete that will 'free' up the cache management page? I am running in performance mode right now (All hooks disabled), so I am pretty sure they are not the problem.

Anything I can show to help?

[wimg]

A few questions and things to check, based on my own experience of the last few weeks, trying to set up a bunch of Win 7 based dev and test environments:

1) Is the old server completely offline, as in no connection to the internet or network anymore?

2) Is the ip-address the same or is it different, has the domain name propagated yet? Did you change all system config settings accordingly?

3) Did you clear your entire browser cache, history, temp files and cookies, from the beginning of time (may be a bit hard with Safari)?

4) Are you sure all config and ini files are the same?

5) Did you rebuild the skins? And recache the skins?

6) Did you clear all server cookies? Empty the cookie settings, save, and re-enter, and re-save.

HTH, warm regards, Wim

[wmarcy]

1. Yes, no internet connection at all. It is a real PITA to try to configure the new server, especially the DNS stuff. I can not find any time when I don't have at least 50 members online, 3am I have the fewest and have been waking up then to configure stuff. But yes, zero internet connectivity form the old machine while the new machine is internet capable. (Macs will also tell you if some machine is stepping on a static IP of another machine).

2. Ip is a static IP, it has been running as such for about 7 years now. The Domain name has propagated I have my ttl set to 60 minutes. All system config settings have been changed. I am pretty confident they are set appropriately. (I have a few dozen community member wordpress sites I host on these servers also, and the wordpress servers are humming along fine, old and anew server).

3. I did clear all browser caches, further, I made sure not to run Safari against eh old server at all.

4. I copied over the .ini & .cfg files from mysql ,apache and php, along with the ip.board config file. They are being loaded and used (verified for each component).

5. I did rebuild skins and I recached the skins. I also rebuilt the language files. The only place I am having a difficult time (White screen), is in Cache Management. Again, no error logs being generated by anything for that white screen. The URL looks like it is properly built also.

6. NO, I did not clear the server cookies. I would do that through the ACP Settings: Server Environment/Cookies? - Will give it a go.

[wimg]

3. I did clear all browser caches, further, I made sure not to run Safari against eh old server at all.

6. NO, I did not clear the server cookies. I would do that through the ACP Settings: Server Environment/Cookies? - Will give it a go.

Sounds all good.

As to 3: Did you try another browser as well, just to make sure Safari isn't holding on to some information? I always found Safari and FF the hardest to clear properly, and I also found that this is more of a problem with Invision 3.4.x than the old version we used before (3.1.x).

6. Yes, that is though the ACP. I found that resetting them cleared up a bunch of problems as well, like unwanted redirects to the main forum page etc. I tend to do this stuff in steps, however, to make sure all is really clean. IOW, reset to nothing, log out, close browser, restart, log in again, Ctrl-F5 for good measure, and see if all is ok, then reset the cookie environment variables, and do the same again :smile:.

A few more:

7) Did you also try reimporting the hooks again?

8) How did you install MySQL this time, are you sure it is exactly the same? I had lots of problems trying to keep it the same configuration, unless it was set up manually, completely.

9) The same question for PHP as in 6.

10) Did you also carefully check all configuration parameters for paths and urls? It is very easy to miss one, which is especially hard to see when you have a few slightly different from standard.

11) I also found that in order for rights to be correct, I had to manually change the file attributes after copying, as they were set to read-only - I don't know whether that is the case with Macs of course, but it certainly holds true for Windows. Similarly, on Unix/Linux, I could not properly set the rights, including group and owner, using WinSCP or an ftp program. I actually had to use chown from the command line to get that right.

As to selecting a time to do this stuff: I am not worried anymore these days; at any given time we will have 1300+ users online anyway. I have even created scripts to automate some of the stuff, and it will actually make it impossible for anybody to finish whatever they were doing, although i normally bring the board offline first. A lot of the (database) maintenance work can be done while the board is online, officially anyway, but I found that it often takes several times longer than when it is offline anyway, with everybody suffering in the process. So a short time with everybody suffering seems preferable, from my POV anyway.

Warm regards, Wim