dave-smith.co.uk

did you miss me ?

Didn’t think so, but anyway after a not long enough break my personal website is back up, nothing has changed on it, it’s the old site, on the same server, with the same old pointless drivel.

Of course just because I’ve brought the blog back to life doesn’t mean I have any better ideas of what to do with it.

(written ages ago, but never posted)

So after a lot of doing nothing I’ve finally moved my site, nothing wrong with the old hosting company I’ve been using for the last 10 years, just that the level of complexity they offer is no longer needed by me and I’ve been using Rackspace Cloud Sites now for a year for other bits and pieces and so with a large number of bounced emails due to an IP address being blocked it was time to change.

Simples…..
1) Grab the DB from the old server, do some DNS jiggery pokery and then on to a new site build.
2) Into the Rackspace control panel
2.1) add a new domain
2.2) build a MySQL DB (add a user)
2.3) create an email address

We’re now ready for the site build.

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, uploaded the DB and ran the WP installer, filled in all 4 fields and job done, my site was back, but on new hosting. I decided to grab the plugin’s I wanted and as ever I’m still tinkering with the theme to use.

Oh and I found some useful Word Press tweaks to get the built in updating feature to work.

I added the following to my .htaccess to go above the mod_rewrite stuff

php_value post_max_size 128M
php_value upload_max_filesize 128M
php_value memory_limit 128M
php_value max_execution_time 6000000


Less than an hour to migrate the site including the DNS changes and email setup, happy days.

So it was time to replace the home Mac Mini, it had done sterling work as the main home machine serving as a home for all of our photos, music and used for general surfing, but it was certainly slowing down, the upgrade to Snow Leopard had gone well and helped prolong its life but the signs were there, time for something new and shiny.

The Mini was sitting on top of 2 x 1Tb Iomega Minimax drives which gave a useful number of extra USB boots and made for a neat tower / shrine. One drive was data the other was the time machine backup, but things had moved on, I now had a QNAP TS-439 with 4 x 2Tb (1863Gb Actual) drives installed and configured as RAID 6 (3664Gb usable) so there was plenty of storage to be had and the potential ability to recover from two drives failing.

I configured a number of iSCSI targets and using the Studio Solutions GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator connected up. This was a very simple, one minutes process and having done the same under Windows using the MicroSoft iSCSI initiator I know which I’d prefer to use in future.

I copied the data across into the relevant targets, music, photos and then setup backup using time machine to do the applications, user account and everything else other than the music and pics. To ensure everything worked I quickly re-opened iTunes and iPhoto and changed the library to the iSCSI targets, all was working lovely. Time taken to setup, 10 minutes, time to copy the data about 4 hours in total.

Now the migration, shut down the mac mini, spend an hour moving all the kit around and tidying up the wires and then for the moment of truth. Fire up the new mac, register and ignore the migration assistant for now. Once the mac is running I downloaded the initiator and installed, setup the connections to the iSCSI targets, open iPhoto and iTunes and point the applications to the iSCSI data and all was good. Just the application migration to go.

I opened up the ever so handy OSX Migration Assistant, pointed it at the time machine backup and recovered the old account data and applications on to the machine as a new account, logged out, logged in as the recovered account and the migration was done.

Work done, about 10 minutes, time taken 5 hours of data transfer backwards and forwards.

Job done, no problems and no fuss, technology as it should be.

So this morning was my fourth attempt to update one of the SonicWall units, I was migrating from a Pro 2040 (now EOL) to one of the shiny new NSA 2400 units, on paper it looked easy.

Update NSA 2400 to latest firmware, import config from Pro 2040, however this being the fourth attempt you can see how well it had gone in the past.

(Side note: The problem with upgrading the head office router is that people tend to get upset if there is no email for more than a couple of minutes!)

I’d try to do the swap over in the morning before the office opens in the past and been thwarted twice, and a weekend change out didn’t work so well either. This time however I’d taken the unit home over the weekend and set it all up….

- latest firmware, check
- imported config, check
- installed AD certs, check
- ensure all firewall rules in place, check

So looking like we’re ready to try again.

Plugin, power up and connect to the admin interface, register the device, fails the first time, try again and this time the registration is successful, sorted.

Now to start checking all the services to ensure everything is working as it was.

This time around there is no DHCP crash, no failure of the WAN traffic, all good.

So migration from Pro 2040 -> NSA 2400 – DONE.

Just got to migrate 9 Pro 1260′s now