number 9

Thought I’d migrate gfs (wordpress) blogs to textdrive to take advantage of the mod_security umbrella.

Since she has a few I thought I’d set them up as virtual subdomains (sub.yourdomain.com → yourdomain.com/sub) and have them share a database. Started with a simple one that gets hundreds of comment spams a week.

I was expecting problems getting it into textdrive because I’d set up the main (only) vhost to ”ProxyPass /” → typo (on lighttpd). This ( and the fact that the A record for hellooperator.net doesn’t point to textdrive ) caused all sorts of problems with dav, ical and svn, as you’d expect.

moving the proxied blog to a dedicated vhost

1. made a new ‘virtual server’ (a.k.a vhost) for number9.hellooperator.net
2. got rid of wildcard ”ServerAlias *.hellooperator.net” on the main vhost so the second one would match
3. set some ServerAliases on the number9 vhost
4. mod_proxied the whole number9 vhost → lighttpd
5. unproxied the main vhost and added an A record for it (fixing dav/svn/ical in the process).

getting virtual subdomains to work

1. made index.html in docroot/testsub
2. setup testsub.domain.com at DynDNS pointing to textdrive
3. started tweaking until testsub.domain.com showed the index I’d made
4. tried to figure out why I kept getting the top level index.html.

Turns out it was because of step 2. in the ‘moving proxied blog’ list above.
I was getting the default textdrive index page (because the entire vhost wasn’t recognized) and mistook it for my own index.html. Not sure how I could have avoided that, since number9 is a subdomain of the main site.

Anyway, set testsub.hellooperator.net as an alias on the main vhost and I could see my custom index page.

the wordpress upgrade / server move

1. backed up docroot and db
2. ran upgrade.php on existing server to get 1.2 ->1.5
3. gasped as it actually worked. Theme is screwed but that’s ok.
4. mysqldumped the new db and setup the table_prefix
5. rsynced oldbox:docs → textdrive:docroot/sub
6. loaded dumped db into a fresh textdrive one
7. checked ’helloooperator.net/sub’ worked.
8. repointed dns
9. sub.hellooperator.net worked.

Mainly blogging this so the next one goes a bit smoother….