Muppethouse is Moving

I am moving muppethouse to a new hosting provider to save some money, upgrade the operating system, and hopefully get better proformance (in that order). This is actually a rather difficult task and I could use everyone's help. Over the years muppethouse has accumulated a lot of custom configuration. All the web pages, email domains and aliases, cron jobs, perl scripts, mysql databases, make for a difficult migration. I've been putting in quite a few hours over the last couple weeks to try to make things as seamless as possible - but I WILL miss things that you need. In order to make this happen I need everyone to log into their registrar and change their name server records. The new name servers are:

ns1.slicehost.net
ns2.slicehost.net
ns3.slicehost.net

For those who use custom domains, when you make that name server switch that will trigger a change over of your email. In other words, once the Internet knows that ellinthorpe.com or withoutpants.com are at the new server, all your mail will go to the new server.

Right now there are a bunch of rsync jobs that are trying to keep the two servers in sync - so when you make this change I need to know it so that we can test everything and I can change the rsync job. If you just use a muppethouse email, you shouldn't have a big problem and you will move last.

From my surveying nobody was using the roundcube webmail, so it will be going away. If you use the squirrelmail (old) webmail, I have put a version on the new server as well. Because I only have one IP on the new server I will no longer be making the old webmail available via https (I'm using that for something else).

Another pain-in-the-ass issue is that the IMAP service on the new server is running Dovecot rather than UW IMAP. In general this should be faster, but people will need to move their mail folders from their home directory to the mail folder in their home directory (~/mail). If you've got custom procmail config then you'll probably need to change your .procmailrc to point to the new mbox folders after moving them. There is a folder in your home directory that lists what you have subscribed to with your IMAP client, whether webmail or another client called .mailboxlist. On Dovecot this is in ~/mail/.subscriptions. There are a few choices, I can just write a script to move people's folders for them and create the .subscriptions file. I could do this before the move, or after on a case-by-case basis. Some people already have a ~/mail folder, some do not. I dunno, please work with me on this.

If you have ssh access you can log into the new server at new.muppethouse.com now to see if everything looks as you'd expect. You can pre-test other pieces of this migration (such as your web page) by putting entries in your hosts file pointing to 208.75.86.128. You can connect with an IMAP client to the new server as well.

The old server will be eventually shut off, so please remember to change those name servers and let me know when you do. I'm ready to migrate when you are - lets do it!