One issue which has interested me for a while is moving databases from one server to another. My traditional approach involves taking down the website, dumping the database, copying the dump file, loading it up, and then changing the DNS to point to the new server.
With the goal of minimizing downtime, I’ve been considering […]

I ran into an interesting problem while upgrading the production FreshPorts server. Specifically, this error:

select PortsUpdatingAdd(E’20080708′::date,
E’users of emulators/qemu-devel’, E’nox@FreeBSD.org’, EE’
The port has been updated to a 20080620 SVN snapshot, which uses the
new (incompatible) kqemu-kmod-devel port that now also works for the
32 bit “qemu” executable on amd64. If […]

This post started off as a database move but a software upgrade got in the way.
I tried this move before, but failed to notice that the cvs-all subscription was not correct. This was a combination of DNS and subscription issues. They are now fixed.
Let us try moving the database now.

$ time pg_dump freshports.org […]

A few short notes about upgrading to Apache 2.2 from Apache 1.3.
I did the install. Then found all websites gave this:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /commit.php
on this server.

The issue there was this set of standard directives in /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf:

<Directory />
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny […]

It’s time.
FreshPorts has been running on the BETA server for quite some time. It is time to move back to production.
This will involve a pg_dump, an rsync, another pg_dump, another rsync, a load, a change to DNS, and a redirect in Apache.
We’ll see how it goes. The time is now 8:19 PM EST.
The […]

The fix:

$ cvs di -ub port.pm
Index: port.pm
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/repositories/freshports-1/scripts/port.pm,v
retrieving revision 1.52
diff -u -b -r1.52 port.pm
— port.pm 6 Jun 2008 18:13:41 -0000 1.52
+++ port.pm 10 Aug 2008 21:09:51 -0000
@@ -160,6 +160,7 @@
[…]

This morning I encountered more NULL problems. The error in question was:

$ cat 2008.08.10.02.17.41.98171.txt.errors
DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: column “enull” does not exist
LINE 19: depends_lib = ENULL,
[…]