Migrated the Linode Server

It all started in May… May 17th, to be precise. Maybe I was overconfident with it being my birthday, but just before bedtime I started a major upgrade of the Linode cloud server that hosts this site. It went horribly wrong, and I had to restore the server from a backup. I made two promises to myself:

1. Not to do major upgrades right before bed and
2. I would migrate the server instead of upgrading it.

The second one might take a bit of explaining. When I set up the original cloud server, I followed the documentation, but you could drive a truck through the holes in my knowledge of what I was doing. I made at least two major mistakes: one was choosing the wrong version of Ubuntu Linux. I went with the latest version instead of the stable version, which meant I was constantly bombarded by update notices. The other was having to take two tries to set up the SSL certification process, no doubt leaving digital shrapnel behind. I knew not everything was healthy on the server: I would get notices that certain modules were missing but it would fail when I tried to install them. The failure in May epitomized that. All of that meant it was smarter to start over, even though it was a new unknown.

I started about 9:30 this morning, and this was what I did:

• Create new server
• Update OS
• Harden OS
  • Create limited user so I’m not doing everything as root
  • Create SSH keys
  • Configure SSHD
  • Configure firewall
• Set up hostname
• Transfer all data from the old server
  • Create an SSH key for connecting one server to the other
  • scp content
• Install Apache web server
• Install MySQL database server
• Install PHP
• Install phpmyadmin
• Transfer data for WordPress and FFF
• Configure backup script (not tested yet… need to do that)
• Transfer the biickert.ca domain to the new server
• Configure HTTPS

It took a while, and I took good notes. Hopefully won’t have to do this again for a while.

And since you were so patient reading the above, here is your reward: a picture of Murphy pondering his new window bed.