This new server is about 4 times more powerful than my previous server, but for the same price. I will now definitely be putting lots of new stuff up on here to get the full use out of it. I have my subversion server running off of it, and again, an open invitation to anyone who wants all the free awesome code they can handle :P

Be wary of hosting companies installing MySQL for you. They might install the latest version of it (5.x), but in my.cnf specify that it should use the old password hashing method, the insecure one used before MySQL 4.1. This old method only generates a hash 16 bytes long, whereas the new one is 41 bytes (with a leading *). I did notice it but didn't think anything of it until I tried to login to my website here to post a new item. I had just finished getting all of my passwords for my websites input too. This required looking in the config file that I read to connect to the database to get the current password out, then running "grant all privileges on database.* to 'user'@'localhost' identified by 'password'" for each one. Ridiculous. I think I got them all right on the second go, I didn't feel like reading in the config files again. This site works, and so does Jim and Kate's site (which is awful and is long overdue for an upgrade). Vacre Tei works too. Stringed.org might work but not all of the name servers are pointed correctly yet, so I can't see it. It might work for you, it worked at the office.

Also, if you get "Can't connect to MySQL" and it's running, chances are it isn't allowing networking. I just commented out those two lines (old-passwords and skip-networking) and if I got all the passwords right, everything should work fine. Overall, the transition from the old server went without a hitch, but was a pain in the ass. Here's the breakdown:

1. Zip up the websites on May 24 and promise not to upload any new files because then they'd also have to be pushed over.


2. Zip up the databases and promise not to make any new posts or anything.


3. Zip up tomcat since I don't want to have to reconfigure it


4. Download them (the size of jasontconnell.com gzipped up is currently over 600 MB)


5. Upload everything to the new server.


6. Extract everything where it belongs.


7. Update the MySQL passwords


8. Set JAVA_HOME


9. Hope it works