> > - Pick a new wiki provider (Dreamhost) > > - Configure and test *before* freezing or moving DNS records using an > > entry in your local hosts file. > > - Freeze and move content to the new host. > > - Update the DNS records to point at the new host. > > - Decommission the old wiki.
I've moved a few MediaWiki installs and if it helps, here are a few things I have found: Set $wgReadOnly = 'blah' in the old LocalSettings.php. This leaves the wiki accessible to people reading it, but prevents anyone from editing it. This is useful because some ISPs aggressively cache DNS entries and I've found once updating the DNS to point to the new IP address, some people still hit the old site up to a week later. So if it's still there and just read only, at least those people can still read it. You can move the files and the database separately. I usually move the database first, and point the old site to the new database. This then allows me to set up the site on the new server, also pointing to the new database, and test it at my leisure (via the 'hosts' file as Michael mentioned, explained below). I can then be confident that when cutting over to the new site nothing will misbehave as I won't be changing any database settings or importing any additional data, all that happens is the old site gets marked read only, the DNS gets updated, and the images/uploads directory gets refreshed from the old site with rsync. This also leaves the old site connected to the new DB after the cutover, so those people whose DNS hasn't updated will still get to see the latest content, even if they can't make any edits because of $wgReadOnly. I usually change the message at this point to something like $wgReadOnly = 'This site has moved servers but your Internet provider has not yet picked up the change and you are accessing the old server which is now read-only. Please try again in a day or so if you wish to make any edits.'; > That's a better idea and simpler. I already have test.freedos.org that is > usually empty - but right now is hosting a "test" copy of a new iteration > of the website. That seems like a good place to set up a new wiki, before I > push it to an official new wiki.freedos.org hosted on Dreamhost. If you put the entry in the 'hosts' file on your PC (/etc/hosts under Linux, IIRC C:\Windows\system32\etc\hosts on Windows) then you don't need a special DNS entry. You can just put wiki.freedos.org in there with the new IP address and it will override the real DNS entry just for your local machine. This will allow you to test the new site on the real final domain, so you won't need to mess around with the server or wiki configuration. You can set it up on the final wiki.freedos.org domain and test it from your machine, and know that when you update the real DNS it will work just the same for everyone else. Interesting that you are moving it to Dreamhost. I had to move my wikis off Dreamhost a few years ago because they were so slow and had frequent HTTP 500 errors when someone else's site would go rogue and take mine offline too. It would happen a few times a week and my site would be offline for many hours at a time so I finally gave up and moved to Linode, and that fixed the problem (but of course at a price, nobody can beat Dreamhost's pricing!) Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
