I will be changing servers and am considering to use the Mass Transfer option where we can give nodeworx the SSH login for the old server.
My questions:
In /home I have some Interworx accounts symbolically linked to a different hard drive. Will Mass Transfer still work normally with the symbolic links?
One of my sites has a database that is nearly 2gb when I back it up. Are there any size limitations with this Mass Transfer option?
Is there a way to use the Mass Transfer option while at the same time skipping certain things, such as large databases, which I will transfer directly to avoid problems?
I hope you don’t mind but I think the following (please bear in mind I am no expert and no experience of Mass Transfer sorry)
sym links, I would think the mass transfer would not look at these, just simply copy the information, but you would need to make sure the sym links were still correct to the drive on the new server, or the sites dependant upon them I would expect to fail.
Size, I would think would be much larger then 2GB, I hope so as we have some sites between 50 - 200 GB large (overall, not just the database) but I’m sure you could appreciate the time larger sites may take to transfer
I would think you should be alright to do a full mass transfer, unless you wanted to exclude the 2GB site, and do a structure only, with a manual file, database etc transfer.
I hope this helps, and sorry if I am wrong, but if you cannot wait until a more experienced user with mass transfer posts, I would open a support ticket perhaps to have a quicker answer.
When you do a mass transfer, you can select all the accounts that you want to migrate automatically, and skip the more challenging accounts for manual transfer (or set them to only migrate the structure).
As john said, I would chose to migrate the larger accounts as structure-only. And then migrate the information manually using Rsync etc.
The migration will migrate the symlink, and not the content it points to.
For larger migrations, I would say that using the webinterface is preferable. I would also recommend to migrate the accounts in smaller batches. incase something goes wrong, coordinating with customers etc. It’s easier to do with smaller batches of 10-20 accounts /day.
The backup function in interworx is resource intensive, and I would recommend performing the migration during the night, as the customers have less traffic, and there are more resources available to use for the migration. It will generally also allow the DNSes to update before visitors start flooding back to the sites in the morning. Lowering the TTL on the accounts you plan to update 1 day before, will also help with the dns propagation.
Will you have separate nameservers on the new server, or will you use the same nameservers for both new and old servers?
If you use the same nameservers, you will need to remove the old account after migration, else you will get visitors to both servers, and that will just get messy.
If you will use separate, new nameservers for the migrated accounts, you will need to go in to the DNS zones of the accounts, and update the NS record. If you migrate the reseller accounts first (migrate a single customer account/reseller to migrate all the resellers easily), and then update the nameserver information on the reseller accounts, it should automatically update the customer accounts NS records (this is separate from the ns changes you need to do @ the domain registrar).
Some customers might have problems logging in after migration, just have them reset their passwords, and they should be alright.