Hey everybody,
I'm going to be swapping out the Web server tomorrow. I already have Apache and PHP installed on the new server, and I'm actually using it right now (hitting the same DB as the old server). So basically, I'm prepared to start the migration.
However, it's going to take some doing, and it's going to break stuff. I guarantee. So be prepared for a little downtime/instability tomorrow evening when I do it. I expect no more than ~30 mins of downtime, followed by a couple hours of instability (as I fix things I broke), and probably another week of minor instability as people report other broken things to me.
I'm hoping this goes smoothly. The biggest change is to security -- I will be using suphp on the new server, so everything will run in the context of its owner. That means that if somebody writes crappy code in their home directory (for example, if I upload something stupid to ~ron), it can't affect other sites on the server without a privilege escalation attack or similar. I'm also going to be making other changes that you probably won't notice.
The downside of using suphp is that PHP has to run as a CGI module instead fo an Apache module. That means it runs somewhat slower. When I first tried this, it was noticeably slower, but I upped the RAM dedicated to the Web server and now it's running the same as the old one. I guess it just likes having the extra RAM.
So yeah, expect downtime tomorrow, everything should be back to normal after that.
