Creating a test blogging server
I’ve been working this week on setting up a test blogging server. We have a production blogging server up and operational. However, I really need a test server into order to get out some bugs in our customization of Movable Type. We had a test server initially but had to reformat it because… well I made a HUGE mess out of it. So now I’m trying to get a new pristine install that I can make an image of and then start testing with.
Getting the files and data from my production server moved to the test server was a snap. I did a mysqldump and secure copied that and the other webserver and cgi files to the test server. The bigger problem was reconfiguring mysql with the proper users, coldfusion, and apache2. I looked back at my blog and I must have been out of it because I didn’t document the process of getting the weblogs server set up at all. So the redo has been slow going. Top on my to do list tomorrow is to create a more complete set of documentation of how the server is configured. That way when I have to reconfigure it again I will be a bit more of a clue.
One critical piece that I had forgotten from setting up Coldfusion was making it talk to MySQL. This meant that updating the JDBC driver in Coldfusion so that it can communicate with MySQL 4.1 (which is the version we have installed on our servers). Looking at the MySQL website I’m thinking that maybe we should be running MySQL 5.0 but I’ll think about that a bit later. There is good documentation on how to deal with making Coldfusion play nice with MySQL 4.1 on the Coldfusion website. (I’d FURL’d this so finding it again wasn’t too troublesome.)
Another issue I had with getting MySQL set up was recreating the same users/permissions in MySQL on the test server as on the production server. One thing that has always driven me mad about MySQL is I’ve never been able to figure out how to see what permissions a given user had in MySQL. Looking at the user table really doesn’t help. I’ve used phpMyAdmin in the past but on the Windows box it never really worked quite right (or how I anticipated). I need to take a look at it on a Linux box to see if it can give me better user information and behaves as I anticipate.
Tomorrow is another day and hopefully I’ll complete getting things set up. One plus for this week is we successfully finished migrating our webservers to Linux. Doing this required getting a lot of little things setup and working properly. From creating daily log files to setting files permissions to writing scripts that sync out staging and production server and copy the log files off to another server for processing and storage.
Although I’ve learned a lot in the last six months, (I can create users and groups in Linux, do major amounts of Apache configuration, adjust file permissions, and create rewrite and redirect rules) I’m terribly grateful for and beholden to the Head of Computer Systems and Networking for his expertise. He has to do all the things I don’t know how and hold my hand when I forget how to do something or have confidance issues. I hope I’m taking up less of his time as I learn more, but I’m curious and love to know more so I’m always asking questions. I remember being like this at Cortland when I was learning about running Windows servers. Hopefully, a day will come soon when I can get through a day without asking any questions.