The last few days have involved quite a lot of work moving the Drupal instance intended for the new Tencompetence site from the “Elrond” server on to a new and shiny virtual server called “arwen” with a view to it going live for production use. This is the same server which we are intending to use for the new cetis site, so much of the software installed and buttons tweaked will be of long-term benefit to the whole organisation. There is a page in the internal cetis wiki detailing exactly how the machine has been set up.

Mostly this has gone smoothly but I’ve had a few gotchas along the way. The most catastrophic of which was that after moving it and it looking like everything was working, it started throwing errors when adding new content. It turned out that it had lost all the “Auto Increment” settings in the database and I had to go through table-by-table and fix them. Also (and this will hopefully not matter too much) the collation has got set to Latin-1 Swedish when it should be UTF-8 General. I’m going to try and fix this in a global change later in the week. Clearly I must have missed ticking a couple of boxes when exporting the database from Elrond. I really hate file-encoding issues…

UPDATE: There was an issue with attachments – some funkyness with mimetypes was causing word documents to get an extra .txt appended to the filename. This was fixed by adding the following lines to the bottom of php.ini
[mime_magic]
mime_magic.debug = Off
mime_magic.magicfile = “/usr/share/file/magic.mime”

Also, cron jobs were not happening, causing the aggregator to fail. Two things needed doing, adding a file to /etc/cron.hourly/ containing:
#!/bin/bash
curl -s http://localhost/tenc/cron.php > /dev/null
exit 0
…which calls the script on the hour. However there was also a problem causing PHPs fsockopen command to fail with a “permission denied” message. After a lot of hunting around it turned out that the SELinux security policy of the host machine (Fedora Core 5) was blocking the creation of sockets. I turned it off and all is now running sweetly.

This morning (16 June) the URL was switched over at the OUNL end. This has gone more-or-less fine however there are some funky redirects going on for people who are still pointing at the old server. A line needs editing in the drupal configuration to make the site refer to itself by name rather than ip address… I’ll do this towards the end of the day I think once everyone is pointing in the right direction.