This is an old revision of the document!
We've still got plenty of work to do before we can move the new system(s) into production.
NOTE: Enter any command-line programs you want to install here.
Need to check for security updates.
Need to configure all regular users. (Actually, we need to determine if regular users will have accounts on these boxes at all.) If we do allow normal users, we need to transfer over the same UIDs and (shadow) passwords as the existing boxes (Michelob and Dark) use.
I'm not sure if there's anything left to do on the firewall. We may need to open some more ports for new services.
We definitely need to document how we configured the firewall.
Outbound email seems to be working OK.
Inbound SMTP seems to be working OK, but the hand-off to Cyrus seems to be broken.
Lots of testing (via the test.sluug.org domain) will be required before we're ready to send production email to the new system.
We need to figure out how users on the existing servers (Michelob and Dark) will be able to access their email without needing to make any major changes on those systems.
Make sure SSL is working properly, including (self-signed) certificates. (Probably include instructions to users on how to accept our certificate authority.)
Need to verify that all virtual sites are working.
Need to determine what web apps we plan to run, especially if any of them will control the root home page of a virtual site. Possible web apps include:
Before moving www.sluug.org and www.stllinux.org to the new system(s), we need to make sure that we've got all the old content moved over, and pages with all the same names that external sites are pointing at. To make sure, we need to monitor the Apache logs after moving over, to see what non-existant pages people are trying to access.
We discussed backups a little. The consensus was that full backups would not be necessary. We could build the system from scratch just about as quickly as performing a full restore. Instead, we plan to back up only the data and configuration info. I.e. /home (including web sites), /etc, parts of /var (email spool), and maybe /usr/local.
We'll also need to back up the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
For the majority of our backups, we'll probably just transfer the data to another computer across the Internet.
Need to frequently update packages that Debian updates due to security issues.
MySQL and PostgreSQL databases require periodic maintanence. For example, Matthew Porter recently explained how failure to VACUUM a PostgreSQL database will lead to very slow access times after bout a month of moderate-heavy use.
We'd really like to have 2 systems, so that we can fail over to a backup system if the primary fails. Each system would be doing its own thing under normal conditions. If one system were to fail, we'd manually switch its functionality over to the other system.