My vast empire of web sites—well, my blog and some side projects like Jigsawr and Spreadsite—all run on a Linode node in London. When I bought it—375 days ago—Ubunty 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ was all the rage. Karmic loses security support in April 2011, so I have upgraded my server to 10.04 LTS ‘Lucid Lynx’. I chose Lucid because it is a LTS (long-term support) release.
This was just a case of following the recipe on the Linode documentation site. After a few tense minutes it was rebooted with the new operating system (and 512 MiB of RAM rather than the 360 MiB I originally had, which is a nice bonus). But no http://www.alleged.org.uk/! Panic!!
Actually there were two things going wrong, both easily fixed. First, I never did get around to making Nginx start up at reboot automatically, so I had to log in and start the daemon myself.
Second, it seems that one or more of the packages installed for the
Python on Karmic are not compatible with Lucid. This was relatively easy
to fix. First I logged in with SSH using the alleged login, then
disposed of the old virtualenv and created a fresh one:
alleged@titania$ mv ~/virtualenv/alleged{,-karmic}
alleged@titania$ virtualenv --no-site-packages --distribute ~/virtualenv/alleged
The list of packages I need to install (including Django) is all
recorded for in REQUIREMENTS, so I can reconstruct the
environment in a couple of commands:
alleged@titania$ . ~/virtualenv/alleged/bin/activate
alleged@titania$ cd Sites/alleged
alleged@titania$ pip install -r REQUIREMENTS
alleged@titania$ pip install flup
(The Flup package is used on the server but not on the development version. It is the FastCGI library used to connect the application to Nginx.) Once this was done it was just a case of restarting the FastCGI service and voilà.
There is one gotcha: the above leaves a file
/tmp/distribute-0.6.8.tar.gz that must be removed before running these
commands as another user (and I have a separate user account for each
site).