giginger's thoughts

Now that my sites are all moved over to Mediatemple I feel I should write a little guide here. I had trouble finding a useful guide that worked specifically for moving from Dreamhost to Mediatemple. There were a couple of guides but I found their examples weren’t as clear for me as they could have been. The simple way to transfer the site was to download everything using FTP and upload it again to the new site. However, that would have taken hours. Whilst I had some trouble getting the right commands for my case it was worth it as I saved myself so much time. Downloading my sites would’ve taken about 8/9 hours which is not bad. However, uploading would’ve taken a few days. Not even worth considering as an option.

Here’s how I did it.

Your first steps will obviously be to ssh in to your dreamhost account. I used PuTTY^* for this as it’s free and works perfectly. If you don’t know how to ssh in then maybe this isn’t for you.

The command below doesn’t remove anything from your Dreamhost account. It just copies it straight across to your Mediatemple account.

scp -r dreamhostdomainfolder mediatemplusername@sitenumber.gridserver.com:/home/sitenumber/domains/

You will be asked for your password.

Instead of dreamhostdomainfolder you could use * which will just transfer everything you have on your dreamhost account. Every folder including those log files. Depends how you want to work it. I found it easier to do this and then delete the folders I didn’t need afterwards. I suppose it really comes down to your own way of working.

Now, to delete the folders you don’t need you’ll need to use the command rm -rf foldername. Be careful with this one though. Wrong foldername and you’ll have to transfer all over again! Some folders will say permission denied. The easiest solution I found for that was to CHMOD them to 777. After that you’ll have no trouble.

The next step I took was to dump my databases to a sql file and transfer them across.

mysqldump --opt -udreamhostusername -pdreamhostpassword -h dreamhostmysqldomain databasename > outputfilename.sql

Then I transferred them across to Mediatemple

scp outputfilename.sql mediatemplusername@sitenumber.gridserver.com:/home/sitenumber/data/

Note that your sql files are going into a folder called data and not under domains. I had no problems here myself Just be sure that you’re accurate with database names and file names. You don’t want to export the file and then overwrite it with a different one.

Then I populated my mediatemple database(s). Make sure you’ve created your mediatemple databases first however. My largest database was about 450meg and that seemed to complete in about 30 seconds. You’ll need to ssh in to your mediatemple account for this part though.

mysql -umediatempleusername -p -h internal-db.sitenumber.gridserver.com databasename < outputfilename.sql

If you run something like WordPress, you’ll need to edit the database connection settings. There’s full help for this on the WordPress site and the Mediatemple site.

1. * Link to putty [↩]

A quote from this article.

The burden of the past — of supporting decades-old systems and code — is simply too heavy. Microsoft ought to build a new, modern, stripped-down OS and support the legacy stuff in a virtual machine.

I suggested the very same thing a few weeks ago. It’s nice to know that other people are calling for Microsoft to do the same thing. I really do hope they are considering that as an option.

Me, since getting the TV.

I’ve been meaning to post about my new TV ever since I got it. It’s distracted me a bit too much though so I haven’t got round to it. Hence the quietness in this area.

Where to start? This TV has shown me a whole new world of quality in movies and games.

I can’t believe I managed to complete Assassin’s Creed II on the crappy old thing I had before. When I look at the in-game map I can tell the difference between all of the symbols. Originally it was only a few I could tell apart. From playing just a few games I can tell I’ve been seriously limiting my gaming joy. I might need to go through all the games I’ve got just to admire them again. That said, I’ve just got Alien vs Predator and I’m loving it. I was a bit concerned at first but after playing through as the Alien I can say it’s really quite good. It’s a shame the Alien chapter was so short though. I think I could happily have had just an Alien game that was 3 times longer. Still, I can try and play it through on Nightmare setting.

I’ve not just played games though. I’ve been watching some TV too. SD broadcasts over freeview don’t look their best on this TV because, essentially, it’s being stretched to fill the screen. However, the upscaling the TV performs means it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as it could.  Downloaded TV however is amazing. If a programme has been broadcast in HD then I’ll download it in that format now. Takes a little longer, but it’s definitely worth it. A full HD^* programme takes a lot longer but is even better. However, those come from a Blu-Ray so if it’s recent TV it’s not in that quality. I won’t complain about 720p quality though as it’s great.

1. * 1080p [↩]