I\’ve hit a dilemma. I need to move this server to a new IP address. In no way, is this an easy task, nor did I ever expect it to be. The way I wanted to do it, I can\’t, so life it would seem be telling me to try something else. Let me describe the problem for everyone:
The internet, as many of you know is really nothing more than a bunch of computers all tied together using routers, hubs, and switches. The only thing that keeps the thing going is the fact that everyone has a magical number. This magical number helps other computers find your computer, and vise versa. Of course, numbers are only good to machines, so the internet created a rather nifty way of handling names. This process is done VIA something called DNS or domain name service.
There\’s a problem though. There is a delay between the DNS and the time it takes the ip addresses to change. That means anytime a change is made to a DNS record, one of two things can happened. Either it sees the old version or the new version, depending on how long it has been since it\’s name changed. Because of this, if I were to just change the nameservers right now, as well as the IP address, it would look like JR was down for up to 48 hours to some people. This is of course, not acceptable. There are some tricks to reduce the time on this, but no matter how you look at it, it adds up.
So instead, I think I have decided on another plan which takes about 100 times more work, but may provide me with some other interesting options. I plan on moving each site, 1 by 1 to a new server, taking it down in a fashion that no matter what happens it should remain up. I will start with the JR site, and go on to sites that are easy to move (the ones where downtime isn\’t going to hurt me), and then onto the harder ones.
This may mean that FTP or something stops working, email will however continue to work… It must.
This means I can always dump the crap on my current server that is no longer needed (sites that died out years ago). I think in fact, I\’m going to start doing this now… so later everyone.
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Your server has two network cards, right? MSA has a lot of bulk network cable, right? I bet it's even enough cable to stretch between the two places your server will be located. I'd even bet the Implex people, if you begged them, would let you leave a cable lying across the floor for two days. If the two ips happen to be behind the same router, you could even just set up eth0:1, but I suppose that isn't the case.
I think this is what Justin was thinking at first. But the guy at Impex when I was there said that wouldn't work because of this: you can only have one default route. I think I'm forgetting something, but because of that, traffic on one of the NICs would only work in one direction. As i said, I think I'm forgetting something, so Justin could explain it better.
Oh, and also, if the default route wasn't a problem, then he wouldn't need the long network cable anyway. Implex's routers are smart enough so that even though his server is moved into it's new half rack, he is still using his old IP address.