Site Upgrade - About time

Rackable NM46X Dual Quadcore AMDWarren Sanders put together a newer server to host this domain on. The system we were using was put together about 5 years ago. When we originally set it up, it was running CentOS 4.0. It was upgraded with each CentOS update and worked its way all the way up to CentOS 4.9. Anyone using RHEL 4.x or a clone can tell you that it is rather old in the tooth. For example it uses PHP 4.x.

A few weeks ago, I migrated all of our OpenVZ containers to the new system. The host node is running Scientific Linux 6.x. The containers continued to run CentOS 4.x Today I decided to make a new container and migrate all of the accounts and data to the new system. I basically went from CentOS 4.9 i386 to Scientific Linux 6.1 x86_64. The migration went pretty smoothly. My wife has a couple of Drupal 6-based sites and they just worked. I have a few Drupal 4.7.x based sites (which includes this one) and there were some issues. The main problem is that the Drupal 4 series is no longer supported / updated... and there are a number of known issues with Drupal 4.7.x and PHP 5.3. Going from PHP 4.x to 5.3.x is indeed a big jump. I also tried using the binary files for MySQL but ran into problems and ended up using mysqldump to export everything to an .sql file and then importing it. I don't know if the issues I ran into were caused by the big jump in MySQL versions or simply because I switched from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Any any event, with my testing and a little bit of php source code editing, this site is back in operation. It took me a couple of hours and there are still a few issues. What issues are those? Well, there will be no new account registrations and existing users can't edit their account information. Other than that, everything seems to work well enough.

I eventually plan on creating a new, Drupal 7-based site. I think trying to upgrade from the existing version through 5, then 6 and finally to 7... would be very problematic... unless there is someone out there who has done it. Problems with upgrading are what have held this site back at Drupal 4. Also being on CentOS 4.9, it was impossible to use Drupal 7 because it requires PHP 5.3.x at a minimum. I'm not really sure how I'm going to go about it... run both the old site and the new site... and manually copy and paste content between them? Or maybe I'll just run the old site in read-only type mode... and just use the new site for new content only. We'll see how it goes. I don't currently have a timeframe for when I'll set up the new site... so my guess is that this site will limp along for a while yet. Just wanted to let everyone know about the big change made today.