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RIAA Web Site Moved To Linux
xseedit writes "The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow's Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven't moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years. Will Mindshift do a better job hosting one of the most reviled, and therefore most attacked, Web sites in the world? I wonder if anybody at the RIAA or TST would care to comment on the reasons behind this sudden move. Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?"
Um, how hard can a server migration be?
Take snapshot of old server
Deploy snapshot on new server.
Test new server under simulated load.
Sync new server with old server. Bonus if you can keep any web boards fully functional during the transition.
Redirect DNS.
PROFIT.
Sure the details are a bit more complicated but for a single server or small farm that's the gist of it.
If you plan it right and execute it right it should go without any hiccups.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In case some people want to see for themselves the Netcraft stats can be found here and to verify who owns a domain and what the authoritative nameservers are one should use whois.
Is this stuff that matters? Perhaps not for everybody, but some people may be interested. The P2Plawsuits site to settle your case online instead of risking court was moved fast, but I wonder how many people would be willing to enter their credit card info on a site with an invalid SSL cert.