Maybe I Need A UPS

Well that was fun.

Power outage = blown integrated network card = no network access on server + limited PCI slots = removal of one TV tuner for temporary network access.

Good lord, now we can only record one TV show at a time!  How can we live like this, forcing us to prioritize our TV habits!

Now if I want a long term solution (which I do): new network card = new motherboard = new CPU + new memory.

It’s a rebuild!

So forgive me if things are weird or missing on theBside over the next little while.  I have both the old and new server up and running and am moving data as I can.  The transition should be seamless.  Should be.  Just might be a slow one.

Not sure about a UPS as the surge came through the network cable (I think), and I already have a surge protector on the server.  However I’ve also lost a hard drive due to a power outage before, so maybe I should just pony up the cash.

I think I’ll keep a list of valuable and used resources on here in case this happens again, or if anyone else is interested in what I’m doing.

• Decided to use Ubuntu Server rather than desktop, as it comes with a few pre-configured applications I wanted to install
• Decided to not use Mythbuntu this time, as I don’t like the XFCE environment, and can easily add the Mythbuntu repo if I wanted their custom stuff
• Followed this guide to get the old PVR’s database synchronized/replicated with the new one going forward (don’t give the full bin log path on the slave, just the filename as per SHOW MASTER STATUS)
• Will use rsync to automatically synchronize the mythtv recordings between the two, since the databases are sync’d (set up rsyncd on new server as per the Ubuntu Community Doc)
• Will use symlinks to a separate partition (/srv) rather than /var/lib/mythtv for the root of myth – it just feels more accessible and it is easy to put on its own filesystem
• Used reiserfs rather than xfs, though I’m not really sure why – I may change this before proceeding (Update – changed to xfs, may follow this for tweaking if performance seems to be less than ideal.  MythTV itself says to not use reiser for fear of corrupted videos.  OK then!)
• Followed this documentation to get LDAP replication setup (don’t forget to change phpldapadmin’s config.php)
• Followed this guide on setting up mailing lists in my LDAP directory, and this guide to change the reply-to field for the mailing list (don’t forget to run postmap /etc/postfix/generic when you change the generic file!)
• Gallery2 installed – have to uncomment the alias in the apache config file.  The login.txt file goes in the directory in apache.conf too.  Update /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to have more memory.  /etc/gallery2/config.php includes the baseURI if it needs modification (remove the internal hostname).
• Roundcube setup – don’t forget to install roundcube-mysql and edit the debian-db.php.
• phprecipebook – seems I had two people register themselves on the old system.  I thought I had disabled that – hack maybe?  I’m now on the latest version so we’ll see if that happens again.  I decided to create a special user for the recipedb, rather than use the root account (bad idea Kirk, bad!)  just create the symlink in /var/www and update the database info in the custom file.
• Migrating Mythtv is going to be more complicated.  Just to make sure I’m not doing an inadvertent upgrade too, I upgraded my old server to 9.04.  Let the package maintainers handle the upgrade steps I says.  I then followed this tutorial on migrating to a new host.  I ran into the duplicate entry problem described in the comments.  I followed this idea of replacing the INSERT commands with REPLACE INTO commands and I was able to import the SQL commands nicely.  I ended up discovering the hostname was in some of the tables, so I decided to just follow the first tuturoal’s advice – pull specific parts of the databse, drop the mythconverg database, reintall the backend, and then apply the specific updates as per the tutorial so I don’t lose my recorded history.
• Getting MythTV to work: follow the suggestion in this link to stop the incessant spam mail every 10 minutes – how did this bug get passed beta?!?