Server Migration
Yesterday we flipped the switch on our web server migration project. We migrated the campus web server from SunONE to Apache. We had a number of issues to deal with. The big ones were:
- User names were going from an old 8-character limited shellid to our user friendly LDAP uids.
- Going from Solaris to Linux
For the first one, there was some sysadmin magic done with the user/group creation on the new system. This allowed the uid to change, but file and group ownerships to survive the migration. But because the uid was changing we also had to redirect ~ directories from old to new.
The second caused a lot of little problems. Binaries that people had hard coded into scripts were not where they were expected to be. Linux has a lot of stuff in /bin that Solaris has in /usr/bin, like ls. I know, who would hard code the location to ls? People do. A few strategically placed symbolic links solved the majority of these issues.
The one thing that we didn’t account for was the difference in the sshd server key. That caused a lot of problems for the help desk at first. Things have calmed down now and overall the migration went pretty well. Users can now authenticate with the LDAP username and password (which is nice). We now have the ability to start thinking about what kind of services Apache will allow us to offer to our users.
The Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook Good.”