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Migration Completed

On 9-Jan-2012, logins to Willers were disabled. On 11-May-2012, Willers was turned off. The admins are considering bringing it to the nearby shoting range.

We have finished migration from our old system (willers) to a new system, banjo. Banjo quadruples the CPU, doubles the memory, and doubles disk space. It is running FreeBSD 8.1 and updated versions of all related software (Apache, PHP, Perl, etc.).

That's it! Migration is over.

Following is kept around for fun.....

The migration of web pages and other files is done by users -- not by the administrators. See below for details.

During and after the migration, please continue using http://www.employees.org and user@employees.org. We do not and recommend using URLs or email addresses containing banjo.



Migrating an account on Banjo

To migrate an account on Banjo, visit https://www.employees.org/~admin/migrateacct.cgi and follow the instructions there.

IMPORTANT: part of the migration requires reading email on Willers. To read email on Willers, specify the full hostname willers.employees.org in your IMAP, POP, or SSH client.


Moving Files from Willers to Banjo

There are three recommended ways to move files from Willers to Banjo:

1. The simplest are these two commands, which will copy your files from Willers to Banjo, retaining the same directory layout and timestamps:

  willers> cd ~
  willers> tar -czf - . | ssh banjo.employees.org "tar -xzf -"

2. Alternatively, this method will copy all of your files from Willers into a compressed tar file, called willers.tar.gz, on banjo:

  willers> cd ~
  willers> tar -czf - . | ssh banjo.employees.org "cat > willers.tar.gz"

Then login to Banjo and expand the willers.tar.gz file using the command:

  banjo> tar -xzf willers.tar.gz

3. Finally, another technique is to use rsync:

  willers> rsync -avz ~/ banjo:./


moving IMAP folders

The easiest way to move IMAP folders is add a new Banjo account in your IMAP client, and use the IMAP client to move the folder structures (and email messages) from Willers to Banjo.


Virtual Hosts

All of the virtual hosts from Willers were migrated to Banjo. If you manage one of those websites, and are having problems, contact the administrators migration@employees.org.

So far, the problems have been caused by permissions -- be sure to run webit to adjust permissions; see below.


Mailing Lists

All 63 mailing lists that owners said were active have been migrated to the new server. Important: The list's email addresses will remain the same before, during, and after the migration.


File permissions for Apache

On Banjo, the web server accesses your files using file system ACLs, which is indicated by a "+" in the directory permissions. To reset file permissions for Apache, use:

  banjo> webit -r ~/WWW

and, if you have a SWWW directory (for HTTPS), use:

  banjo> webit -r ~/SWWW

more detail is in http://www.employees.org/FAQ#toc10


PHP Changes

PHP on banjo has been upgraded to 5.3. In order to provide better security, we have disabled a number of functions, and we no longer allow short tags (i.e. "<?" or "<?="). If you have questions about PHP, send email to migration@employees.org