[LON-CAPA-admin] Server migration

[Peter Riegler]

Hi Guy and Stefan,

following your discussion I think one issue seems to be clarified:

polya will be degraded to being a development machine, i.e. will 
continue to exist at the same place, preferably with IP and DNS unchanged.

The new machine will serve as THE access server for the complete 
university. Physically it will reside within the rooms of our computer 
ressources department (There are pros and cons to that ... and there are 
political boundary conditions ...).

 From my limited perspective all boils down to what will happen with the 
resources published on polya so far.

Case 1: Resources published so far are not used by anyone outside 
Wolfenbuettel
Will it be sufficient
o to assign loncapa-domain "fhwf" (the one polya currently has) to the 
new server
o and to configure polya to be a standalone server with a different 
loncapa-domain, after the migration has been successfully finished?
I guess it depends on how /res/fhwf/riegler/... is mapped internally to 
the IP-address of the server.

Case 2: Resources published so far are used by someone outside Wolfenbuettel
Not sure about that one.

Happy new year, by the way

Peter

Guy Albertelli II wrote:

> Hi Stefan,
> 
> 
>>Guy Albertelli II wrote:
>>
>>>Let me know if anything need more clarification.
>>
>>Thanks for your help so far.
>>
>>
>>
>>>[...]
>>
>>The procedure you describe seems managable for us:
>>(in short)
>>- Prepare new server (install, configure and test OS and LON-CAPA)
>>- Transfer data from old to new server
>>- Shut down/Disconnect old server
>>- Activate new server
> 
> 
> Yesish. But the details are very important.
> 
> And I think I'd make the summary.
> 
>   - Prepare new server (install, configure and test OS and LON-CAPA)
>   - Disable lon-capa access on old server
>   - Transfer data from old to new server
>   - Shut down old server
>   - "Activate" new server
> 
> 
> 
> 
>>One question left concerning the hostname, DNS name and IP address:
>>
>>
>>>* change the hostname on the new machine to the same DNS name as the old
>>>* either
>>>   - switch the IP address of the new box to be the same as the old
>>>     (I highly suggest this one. On Fedora you can easily change both
>>>      the IP and the hostname using the xwindows application
>>>      system-config-network )
>>>   or
>>>   - switch the DNS entry
>>>* run the loncapa UPDATE prcoedure, configure it to be in the
>>>  production cluster and give it the settings you had on the old box
>>>* reboot the new box
>>
>>The old server should not be seen again in the LON-CAPA cluster, but the
>>new one. The new server needs to have a new DNS name AND a new IP address.
>>
>>Is this possible?
> 
> 
> I don't suggest doing that.
> 
> I highly suggest doing:
> 
>        - install and configure new machine with any new IP adress and
>          any new DNS name
> 
>        - turn off loncontrol/httpd on old server
> 
>        - rsync data from old to new server
> 
>        - turn power off from old server
> 
>        - change the IP address and DNS of the new server to be
>           polya.informatik.fh-wolfenbuettel.de -> 141.41.35.155
> 
>        - reboot the new box
> 
> If anything fails in this procedure you can then just turn off the new
> server and turn the old server back on and then figure out what needs
> to be done differently.
> 

-- 
Peter Riegler
Fachhochschule Braunschweig/Wolfenbüttel
Salzdahlumer Str. 46/48, 38302 Wolfenbüttel
Tel. +49 5331 939 6314, Fax. +49 5331 939 6002
email: p.riegler at fh-wolfenbuettel.de
http://public.rz.fh-wolfenbuettel.de/~riegler