Server migration before server migration (#E15)
Quick update post: My all-time favourite hoster Uberspace veeery recently announced that the entire U6 generation of their servers will be moved to a different data center this very evening, as the old one will be torn down. Wan Hung Lo was hosted on those. Starting time about 8 o’clock in the evening local time, downtime probably four to eight hours in total, but servers are moved in smaller batches.
With two hours notice I decided to upgrade to the U7 server generation which everybody will be forced to by the end of the year (EOS of CentOS6 with EOM by Uberspace). Since their U7 announcement a couple months back they’ve provided a migration tool that will do 99% of the work for you – it’s started from their web page and finished via SSH. So I did, and with the short TTL of my A/AAAA/MX records of just one hour, the mail system switched about half an hour later to the new U7 account. The web pages followed another hour later, as I manually had to delete the default “nothing here, but hello world” index.html page and add spare subdomains myself. U7 also handles Let’s Encrypt certificate renewal automatically, so even their old solution of a very simple CLI script is now obsolete and the corresponding cronjob should be removed from the crontab.
Everything else, especially WordPress migration, happened automatically. As far as I can tell nothing broke or went missing. With the server-to-server migration completed before the datacenter-to-datacenter migration started, I was able to avoid the planned downtime entirely.
Well done, Uberspace, well done.
