Some progress

With no luck trying to resurrect the server, I pulled the disks out and put them into an external cabinet with a USB3 interface. Plugged it into my Windows computer, which didn't know what to do with it. Luckily, I had Ubuntu running in a virtual machine on it, and it immediately mounted each partition so I could get to the data.

So, now all the data (and code) is transferred to the new server, and using Docker I will get site by site up again - load the data into a database, and start each site in its own container. Running into some snafu around session handling vs. new code, which makes the libraries on the old server show their age and lack of maintenance. I was able to get some sites running by "faking it" by simply running the old code and their old libraries as well in the Docker container, but that is not terribly future-proof... So some of the sites will require some change in the session handling code to get up to speed with current libraries, others may not. For now I'll likely be too busy until after Christmas Eve before I can get to the next few sites, but hang tight - we'll get there. :)

Mayday, Mayday, server down

There it is - when restarting the server this morning, the status lights just gave small flashes while something in the computer gave out small ticking sounds / no fan or anything else happened. It's been just over 10 years, and now the motherboard on this server has gone toast too. Tearing apart, cleaning it and putting it back together did no good.

I already have a new server in place and have migrated many things over there. However, not the site you we looking for, yet, since it redirects to this blog entry rather than the actual site. Luckily, it's Christmas, so hopefully I'll have some time to get it done. The plan forward is to

1. Pick the disks out of the cabinet
2. Find some hardware I can use to get to the data off of them
3. Spin up MySQL and PostgreSQL to hopefully dig the data off their databases, to be transferred to the new host
4. Transfer code and the rest
5. Set up the remaining sites one by one

To be continued...  Merry Christmas, everybody!