Server Migration…

If you’re reading this, welcome to Bia, the new home of crschmidt.net and associated webhosting.

Athena services are slowly switching to bia. I’ll do a rundown of what I did post-friday, when I’m sure I’ve actually got everything working, but one cool trick I pulled is to use:

for i in 25 110 143 587 993 995; do
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp –dport $i -j DNAT –to-destination 64.92.170.181:$i; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 64.92.170.181 –dport $i -j SNAT –to-source 65.110.51.60;
done

The biggest problem I had been having up until this point was how to migrate mail. Web stuff is easy by comparison: You just tell people not to update their MySQL content in the meantime, and have them switch their DNS. But mail is hard. During the time when DNS has been switched, hours or days can go by with cached MX records clogging up older systems. This system basically turned athena into a beefy NAT router for bia on all mail ports: Thus, when someone sends mail, it opens port 25 on athena, which actually opens port 25 on bia, and talks to it. Immediately after this, I did a final rsync of all the /home/vmail/ dirs, and turned off Postfix on Athena.

Pretty nifty solution to what seemed to be a hard problem.

Crucial Paradigm, by the way, has been an extremely helpful ally in the migration process. Many thanks to them for helping me get set up in my new home.

More details on the move and the reasons for it coming soon.

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