My friend and web host, Martin, recently decided to scrap his old server running DirectAdmin, and replace it with a shiny new CentOS VPS running Plesk. Having spent an enjoyable day with him last week rummaging in the bowels of the old server trying to fix SpamAssasin, I agreed heartily with his decision. I got dnorth.net over to the new machine with reasonably little fuss, apart from a few minutes when I hosed the DNS by being in too much of a hurry. I also forgot to copy the .htaccess file, which resulted in everything but the front page of this blog being down for several hours. Of course, I didn’t check anything except the front page.
Moral of the story: command-line scp doesn’t copy files whose names begin with a dot, unless you explicitly tell it to, i.e do this:
scp -r user@host:'/dir/* /dir/.*' destination-dir
Rather than this:
scp -r user@host:'/dir/*' destination-dir
And just because the front page works, that doesn’t mean the rest of the site is OK…
