migrating web servers and associated scripts using rclone copy

As mentioned in the previous post, our server migration involved consolidating a web server into a DB server - we chose this method, since cloning the DB server was quick, while export followed by import of MySQL databases takes quite a bit longer as noted in the earlier 2024 migration post.

Copied the ssh private key for the destination server to the source server, and created an rclone remote using SFTP to the destination server. 

zip -r -q webserver1.zip /path/to/webserver/files

(repeated this for all the web server directories later)

rclone copy webserver1.zip rcloneremote:/home/azureuser

(repeated this for all the other zip files later)

From the destination server,

unzip webserver1.zip

cd path/to/webserver/

sudo mv files /path/to/webserver

cd /path/to/webserver

sudo chown -R azureuser:www-data .

sudo chmod -R 775 .

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Then, the apache config files - 

sudo zip -r -q etcapache.zip /etc/apache2

(rclone copy etc, and change ownership to root)

and the letsencrypt certificates etc,

sudo zip -r -q etclets.zip /etc/letsencrypt

(rclone copy etc, and change ownership to www-data for the file/directory which it needs, and the others to root)

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With these, the files to be copied for the web servers were done. And I could start them up - 
sudo a2ensite webserver1
sudo systemctl reload apache2
etc.

Also needed were

• installing all the necessary apache and php modules - which I had done earlier using the steps at the 2024 migration post.
• installing restic for backups as per the backups section of that post.
• rclone copy, individually, for the .sh backup scripts and the notifier directory.
• Copy-pasting lines from .config/rclone/rclone.config  as noted in the restic backup script - the rclone config was modified by copy pasting the extra remotes from source to destination.
• Copy-pasting cron jobs from both crontab -e and sudo crontab -e
• Setting up postfix with gmail smtp as mentioned at this post for which 
  sudo apt remove ssmtp
  sudo apt install mailutils postfix
  and then editing the conf files was required.

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Then, we had awstats running, so 

sudo zip -r -q etcawstats.zip /etc/awstats

for the config files, and

sudo apt install awstats

with editing out the cron which is auto installed at
sudo nano /etc/cron.d/awstats

and then copying across the awstats data - the DataDir was set to this directory -  

sudo zip -r -q varlibawstats.zip /var/lib/awstats

(then rclone copy, then unzip on the destination machine, move and set appropriate permissions etc) 

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Tested the backup and load alert notification scripts, checked awstats the next day to verify that the stats were updating correctly.

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Edit: one week later - some more configurations which were missed out.

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache

sudo certbot --apache

This was sufficient to enable auto-updates for the letsencrypt SSL certificates which had been copied over from the old server.

On another server, onto which we had migrated a single domain, but which already had other active letsencrypt SSL encrypted websites,

sudo certbot --cert-name subdomain.ourdomain.org

for renewing only this one, without disturbing the others.

For removing a certificate later, we can use

certbot delete --cert-name example.com

[so you will need to know the exact cert-name - not the specific FQDN(or domain name) within the cert]

[you can get the cert names with: certbot certificates]

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-do-i-remove-a-certificate/121475

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One of the Moodle instances gave an error, Adhoc task failed: assignfeedback_editpdf\task\convert_submission,The configured path to ghostscript is not correctly set: The ghostscript path points to a non-existent file

Solution was to install ghostscript,
sudo apt install ghostscript

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Then the php max_file_upload also had to be modified according to this earlier post, https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2021/03/some-post-install-changes-needed-for.html

sudo nano /etc/php/8.3/apache2/php.ini

( Ctrl+w to find and change post_max_size

Ctrl+w to find and change upload_max_filesize

Ctrl+w to find and change max_execution_time  - set to 600 for now.)

sudo systemctl restart apache2

and also did the same for /etc/php/8.3/cli/php.ini

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When upgrading a plugin, a warning was shown that php extension soap was not installed, and that update will continue only after it is installed. So,

sudo apt install php-soap

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