DreamHost PS migration Tips

I've recently relocated to the DreamHost private server setup, not for any reason other than its such a cool offer by DH, albeit pretty darn expensive compared to the shared hosting setup. Here are some problems I experienced and the solutions.

No crontabs or cronjobs

None of my crontab files were moved to my new server and in fact I was receiving permission denied just to access my crontab.

Solution

I contacted support and they installed new crontabs for me and offered to copy my old ones.

Static IP Changed for site with non-DreamHost DNS

For the most part this didn't cause to many errors. But one site uses DNS from a different provider, so my site was down until I updated the DNS with that provider. It would have been nice and should be expected that in this situation DreamHost would alert you that the change is going to happen so you can update your DNS.

References to old server and old static IP's not updated

Some of my sites and user accounts use passwordless SSH to make some things work, and all of these were broken until I made new keys and set them all up.

I have some pretty technical and complex sites, cgi's, and .htaccess setups on some of my sites, and many of my files contain code to use ssh or scp to login to another user account on a different server. And some of my files contain references to the Static IP and/or dreamhost server. When both the Static IP and dreamhost server changed it broke all my files. The solution I came up with was I wrote a simple shell script that I can run from the root of my user account using SSH that searches all of my sites files for references to my old Static IP and old dreamhost server and 1 by 1 asks me if I'd like to replace them with the newer IP and dreamhost server.

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s extglob

renice 19 $$

OLDSERVER=208.113.183.103
NEWSERVER=208.113.134.190
FIXFILES=$(grep -R -l -i $OLDSERVER $HOME/!(Maildir|logs|backups|source|tmp|doit|php5|php526|ip_abuse) 2>/dev/null)

for thefile in ${FIXFILES[@]}; do
 if [ -f "$thefile" ]; then
  echo -e "\n\n\n\n"
  echo "___________________________________________________________________"
  echo "Name:  ${thefile}"
  echo "Type:  $(command file -b ${thefile})"
  echo "Size:  $(command du -hs ${thefile}|awk '{ print $1}')"
  echo "Matching Lines:"
  grep -i --color=auto $OLDSERVER $thefile
  echo -e "___________________________________________________________________\n"

  echo -en "Replace occurances of $OLDSERVER with $NEWSERVER? [y/N] " ; read -n 1 ans
  case "$ans" in
   n|N) echo -e "\nSKIPPING..."; ;;
   y|Y) echo -e "\nREPLACING..."
        cp $thefile $thefile.b1 &>/dev/null
        cat $thefile.b1 | sed "s/${OLDSERVER}/${NEWSERVER}/g" 1>$thefile
        rm $thefile.b1 &>/dev/null
        echo "DONE"; ;;
  esac
 fi
done

exit 0

Due to the limitations of the forum, I published a more complete DreamHostPS Migration Tips on my blog.

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