A new year has arrived yippie! 
Christmas and New Year’s are over although I spent most of it working doing server upgrades it was still a good time. Why do it then? Well for one traffic is low so scheduling major changes is not going to affect sites as much.
I can say welcome to the new year with everything now up to date and running the latest version on some shiny new hardware. The new US servers were already up to date but our original US server needed some major overhauls. In September we had a move to bigger and better hardware but were still running RedHat9 and the original versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL, while things were secure an update was way overdue.
After the upgrades the Eagle server is now running the same setup as the other servers CentOS5, Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 5.0.67. As we did some extensive testing before the upgrades we only had a couple of small issues that were easily rectified.
The Australian servers were not left out of the upgrades, we had the option of setting up another VPS or moving to our own Dedicated hardware. Operationally it made more sense to consolidate things and get a decent Dedicated server to reduce management overheads so that is the path we took. As we were setting up from scratch on the new hardware it was loaded with the latest versions so the spec is the same as Eagle.
Once the new server was online and testing had been completed, it was just a matter of transfering everyone over and redirecting traffic from the old servers to the new server.
Redirection will be inplace for a couple of weeks just so nothing gets lost.