New Fasthosts VPS

New virtual private server for email and seme4.com website

Fasthosts.co.uk “VPS2” (2 cores, 4GB RAM, 120GB NVMe SSD). Debian 12

87.106.35.187

“Cloud Panel” at https://cloud.admin.fasthosts.co.uk/ (username ian.millard@seme4.com)

Initial setup

Login as root with password from control panel.

Hostname

[root@seme4]#  hostname seme4.com

edit /etc/hostname to contain seme4.com

IPv6

Allocated new address via web control panel

[root@seme4]#  ip address add 2a00:da00:f423:dd00::1 dev ens6

Create users

[root@seme4]#  useradd -m -g users -G staff,sudo -s /bin/bash icm
[root@seme4]#  useradd -m -g users -G staff,sudo -s /bin/bash hg
[root@seme4]#  passwd icm
[root@seme4]#  passwd hg

Install sympl

https://sympl.io is an open source fork/extension of the old Bytemark symbiosis hosting utilities.

[root@seme4]#  wget -O install-sympl.sh https://gitlab.com/sympl.io/install/-/raw/master/install.sh
[root@seme4]#  bash install-sympl.sh

General administration

Note that operations should be undertaken as the sympl user (run sudo su -l sympl)

Do not use root.

Websites, mail, config etc are defined and stored under /srv/seme4.com/ and should be configured and manipulated primarily using the sympl command line tool.

See https://wiki.sympl.io/view/Sympl for more info (also possibly https://forum.sympl.io/)

Create website

[sympl@seme4]$  sympl web create subdomain.seme4.com
[sympl@seme4]$  touch /srv/subdomain.seme4.com/config/ssl-only
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo sympl-web-configure

Create database

[sympl@seme4]$  sympl mysql create dbName

Note it actually uses MariaDB

Data transfer from old server

Old: 213.138.114.57

New: 87.106.35.187

On the old host, set a new temporary root password: nXzQK7MwuqHB3PTsCEtYrV

Also edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PermitRootLogin to Yes. Restart with sudo systemctl restart sshd

On the new host stick the following into /home/sympl/.ssh/config

Host 213.138.114.57
  User root
  HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss
  PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss

And execute the following commands

[sympl@seme4]$  sudo chown sympl:root /home/sympl/.ssh
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo chmod g+rw /home/sympl/.ssh
[sympl@seme4]$  ssl-keygen
[sympl@seme4]$  ssh-copy-id root@213.138.114.57

We can then rsync effectively from old to new using ssh keys (without password)

A couple of scripts have been written to perform migration

Website

/home/sympl/server-migration/migrate-website.sh transfered the seme4.com wordpress website

Email

/home/sympl/server-migration/migrate-email.sh brings across (all) email

Subversion

Subversion needs to be run under apache, so sticking it on this server.

Fix DNS to point to this server

[sympl@seme4]$  sudo apt install subversion libapache2-mod-svn
[sympl@seme4]$  sympl create web svn.seme4.com
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo sympl-ssl --force svn.seme4.com
[sympl@seme4]$  touch /srv/svn.seme4.com/config/ssl-only
[sympl@seme4]$  sympl create web svn.ianmillard.com
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo sympl-ssl --force svn.ianmillard.com
[sympl@seme4]$  touch /srv/svn.ianmillard.com/config/ssl-only
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo sympl-web-configure

/home/sympl/server-migration/migrate-svn.sh brings across SVN data

After much frustration as to why javascript wasn’t being served…

[sympl@seme4]$  sudo a2disconf javascript-common
[sympl@seme4]$  sudo systemctl reload apache2