Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Moving a WordPress blog to another domain

Published 5 months, 2 weeks ago. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

qpx-site-domain-migration I provide hosting for free to some of my friends. One of them, QPX, had a side project called Lich’ti. But the latter is no longer active, so he decided to not renew the lich-ti.fr domain.

If Lich’ti’s domain name is dead, QPX’s personal blog is not. His website is powered by WordPress and was available at http://qpx.lich-ti.fr. My job is now to move it to http://qpx.coolcavemen.com. In this post, I’ll tell you how I’ve done it.

Before going further, backup everything, and be ready to revert back to your original situation at any moment ! What works for me will not necessary works for you…

To play nice with your visitors, you can setup a temporary maintenance page while we’re performing the migration.

Let’s start the migration by replacing, in the files served by Apache, all occurrences of the old domain name by the new one:

find /var/www/qpx-blog -mount -print -type f -exec sed -i 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' "{}" \;

If you have doubts about the efficiency of the command above, you can check the presence of the string we’re looking to replace via this command:

grep -RIi "qpx.lich-ti.fr" ./*

Then, we dump the database containing all WordPress content and config to a local file (the command will prompt for password):

mysqldump -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --opt --databases "qpx_blog" > qpx_dump.sql

And we replace all strings of the old domain by the new one:

sed 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' qpx_dump.sql > new_qpx.sql

Finally, we re-inject the modified database content after clearing the original:

mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --execute='DROP DATABASE `qpx_blog`;'
mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root < new_qpx.sql

Now you can disable the maintenance page and test the blog to check nothing’s broken.

Again, to play nice with your visitors (and search engines), you can redirect old URLs to the new domain, with apache directives similar to this one:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName qpx.lich-ti.fr
  RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://qpx.coolcavemen.com$1
</VirtualHost>

Fuse and sshfs on MacOSX Leopard

Published 6 months ago. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’m used to access distant machine’s file systems via ssh. My favorite environment, KDE, makes things easy thanks to the support of sftp:// URLs via a kio_slave. MacOSX is not as friendly and don’t have any built-in mechanism of that kind.

To get similar features in Leopard, we have to rely on MacFuse and sshfs. I’ll explain here how I’ve installed these components on MacOSX 10.5.

MacFUSE_Banner

First, download the latest MacFuse dmg and install it. FYI, the version I’ve got was MacFuse 2.0.3,2.

Then, download the sshfs executable for Leopard, either the gzipped version or the binary from the SVN as explained in the MacFuse wiki.

From a terminal, rename the binary:

sudo mv ./sshfs-static-leopard ./sshfs

Then allow the binary to be executed and place it in the system:

sudo chmod +x sshfs
sudo install sshfs /usr/local/bin

From now you can test sshfs mounting with the following command:

sshfs user@myserver.net:/folder/ /Network/distant-folder -p 22

I personally had a problem here: sshfs complained about a missing library. I fixed this by downloading the required file from the MacFusion project and copying it beside the sshfs binary:

sudo wget http://www.macfusionapp.org/trac/export/86/trunk/SSHFS/sshnodelay.so
sudo mv ./sshnodelay.so /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sshnodelay.so

If this fail you can also check:

  • that the current user you’re logged with has access to the distant server with the ssh user@myserver.net command;
  • or that the local mount point exists (you can create it with mkdir -p /Network/distant-folder);
  • and finally, you can add the -o debug option to the sshfs command above to get additional clues.

Now we will automate the mounting of sshfs at every start.

At this point I recommend you to register the root user of your MacOSX system to the distant server:

sudo cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | sudo ssh -p 22 user@myserver.net "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

If doesn’t exists, we have to create the /etc/fstab to edit it:

sudo touch /etc/fstab
sudo vi /etc/fstab

And add the following directives:

dummy:user@myserver.net:/folder/ /Network/distant-folder sshfs allow_other,auto_cache,reconnect,port=22,follow_symlinks,volname="Distant folder" 0 0

As you can see I’ve added lots of options to accommodate my uses. You can get more informations about sshfs options through traditional help pages:

sshfs --help

MacOSX’s automount daemon will look for a script called mount_sshfs at start. Actually it doesn’t exists on your system, but sshfs command line is compatible with what automount expect. So creating a symbolic link will do the trick:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/sshfs /sbin/mount_sshfs

Finally, we can tell automount to acknowledge all our modifications:

sudo automount -vc