A Geeky Week: from Tiger to Leopard (server) in 48 hours and the rest...

I'm a geek and proud of it, although sometimes there never seems to be enough time to 'play' as much as I would like. This past week, well, it's been almost two weeks, (but who's counting?) has been pretty much full of geekiness.  I love tinkering around 'under the hood' and rolling up my sleeves. I'm quite enjoy being the mechanic or the oily rag and I suppose on reflection, it's the challenge of working through technical problems and learning about the solutions that I seem to revel in the most.

It started last week, during my half term break when I headed down to Brighton to upgrade two servers to Mac OS X Leopard Server from a previous Tiger installation. Both servers are now running on Xserve hardware. The Leopard installations didn't quite go according to plan with quite a few unexpected problems. One being the migration (or lack of) of the web services settings from one platform to another. Exporting and Importing settings from a earlier Server release to the latest one (migration) didn't work and so I was left with a very long night ahead, adding the web services data manually and the numerous sites that each machine hosted.

Having got the web services running, I then discovered several pieces of software requiring the GD library in PHP were broken. The standard build of PHP (5.2.4) that comes with Leopard Server doesn't come compiled with GD Library. This meant that I had to re-compile PHP with the GD libraries installed.

I've installed a PHP server monitoring application on another Leopard (client) computer to alert me of any unexpected downtime of either Xserve. I had to enable Postfix using MailServe because this isn't something that is enabled by default.

Leopard Server also requires a realm to be created to enable permissions for users accessing iPHPCalendar using WebDav.

It's been a week of being knee deep in httpd.conf files, MySQL databases and tables, crontabs, and Terminal commands.

These pages helped lots too:

Tiger to Leopard Server Migration, Part One

Tiger to Leopard Server Migration, Part Two