I have a server… and about four years’ worth of content

My new server is up and running, and let me tell you, it’s spectacular.

And if you’re reading this on 6 March 2012, you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about, because everything looks just as slow as usual. That’s because the new server is still behind my firewall because I’m struggling to get my content all moved to it.

I have about 13 years’ worth of content here (the content I wrote between October 1999 and March 2000 is lost to the ages, and most of it probably is no great loss). WordPress has a very handy import/export function, but when I import my content, it only grabs about the first four years of it. And if it’s only going to choose four years, I think I’d rather it grab the last four rather than the first four.

I’m still investigating why, and I suspect my best bet for getting all of the content moved is via a SQL dump file. That’s not my strong suit, but my latent skills have brought me this far, so I should be able to finish the job.

I would have liked to have switched from Apache to Nginx, but it’s pretty clear to me that the difference it would make is minimal. From my local LAN, WordPress posts load instantly and I haven’t done any optimizing on the WordPress side yet. My Internet connection is going to be the limiting factor on this machine, not my lack of cutting-edge software.

And it does appear that 8 GB of RAM and an SSD makes a nice LAMP server. I hoped it would.

If you’re wondering why I’m not writing about something else today, that’s why.

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4 thoughts on “I have a server… and about four years’ worth of content

  • March 6, 2012 at 9:56 pm
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    Dave- It actually came up pretty quickly tonight, 6:50 pst, and I’m on a secured motel wireless this week.

    Paul

    • March 6, 2012 at 10:16 pm
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      Hmm, so my old server is getting motivated? Or maybe I was logged in to the wrong box when I was tuning Apache and PHP and MySQL, and optimized the old server. I’ve done things like that before. I should probably check that before I go live.

      On a positive note, I moved 36 megabytes worth of database dumps to the new server, and it works better than I expected. Once I sync up /var/www on both servers, I think it’ll be ready for regular duty.

  • March 8, 2012 at 9:39 am
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    If you can find a trial copy, check out Navicat. It makes things like SQL exports/imports simple point-and-click adventures. I used it to set up my MySQL backups and used it when moving WordPress from a test server to a production server. phpAdmin also works well. Not quick as slick, but free-er.

    • March 8, 2012 at 9:24 pm
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      Thanks for that tip. Although a lot of people seem to have trouble using plain old mysqldump, it seemed to work just fine for me. I’m experimenting a bit on that box; once I’m happy with my improvements really being improvements, I’ll take it live.

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