Steps for Transition from

www.ohiou.edu to ww2.ohio.edu

The overview of the transition between www.ohiou.edu and ww2.ohio.edu, including a description of the steps that pagemasters should take to prepare for their transition (before the steps on this page), is online at http://www.ohio.edu/transition/. That transition overview also includes a discussion of post-migration steps, to be taken after the steps on this page.

This page provides the detailed, step-by-step instructions for subsite and sub-subsite pagemasters to follow when the time comes to transition their subsite or sub-subsite to the new servers. As discussed in the Schedule section of the transition overview, the process described on this page will be available through the month of January, 2009.

There are two new static-page servers that you will be using:

• the staging server, wws2.ohio.edu (also known as "wws2"); and

• the production server, ww2.ohio.edu (also known as "ww2").

The details for connecting to wws2 and ww2 with Fetch on Macintosh and FileZilla on Windows can be found online through http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/static/chap3.html.

You can use URLs of the form, http://wws2.ohio.edu/yoursubsite/, to preview your pages from the staging server, to confirm that you have correctly uploaded them. You cannot view your pages from the production server until step 4 of the Deployment stage, below. Once your pages are visible from the production server, they will be seen with URLs of the form, http://www.ohio.edu/yoursubsite/.

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WARNING!

If you have been maintaining pages on the old, VMS Front Door server, you may well have gotten used to seeing folders displayed with names such as "[.images]" -- with some SFTP packages, that punctuation (the square brackets and the leading dot) can end up on the folder names on the new servers, where it will cause a 404 (file not found) error.

Please ensure that your web site folders on your personal computer's disk drive, as well as the folders created by your SFTP software on the wws2 and ww2 servers, are free of the square brackets and the leading dot.

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Check-List

1. You send an e-mail to webteam@ohio.edu, identifying your subsite and telling us the OAK login IDs of the people who will be responsible for working on your subsite. If people should have authoring access only to certain sub-subsites, tell us about that, too.

2. Recommended:   You save, on your disk drive, the first of two archival copies of the pre-migration subsite: as it exists now on your disk drive. You may choose to burn it onto a CD, or just copy it to another folder on your hard disk.

3. We tell you as soon as the servers are configured to permit you (and your collaborators, if any) to have the necessary access.

4. Recommended:   You save, on your disk drive, the second archival copy of your subsite: the one from the old server. First, decide which version you are going to save as the second archive: the mid-July version of your subsite, or a freshly re-migrated version:
   • If you want the mid-July version, just connect to the staging server, wws2.ohio.edu, by SFTP, according to the instructions linked above, and download it.

   • If you want a newly migrated version, send an e-mail to webteam@ohio.edu identifying your subsite and stating that you want a fresh migration to replace the mid-July version on the staging server, and you stop all updates until you have heard back from us. This approach is especially appropriate if any one or more of the following conditions applies:
     • you are not sure that you have a complete, up-to-date copy of the subsite on your disk drive;

     • your disk drive has other files mixed in with your subsite's files in the same folders (e.g., the PhotoShop originals of your web graphics);

     • your disk drive has files with names that include semicolons and version numbers (typically as a result of downloading files from the old server); or

     • you would like to take this opportunity to shift over to having all letters in folder and filenames be lowercase, without having to manually rename each file and folder.

     We will let you know when the newly migrated version is in place on the staging server. When it is, you connect to the staging server, wws2.ohio.edu, by SFTP, according to the instructions linked above, and download it.

5. From now on, until the deployment stage, all updates must be done to the old server and also to the staging server, wws2.ohio.edu.

6. If your subsite was not just re-migrated to the staging server in step 4, then you bring the version on wws2 up to date. You may choose to remove everything and re-upload the entire subsite from your disk drive, or you may choose to upload only those items that have changed since July 1, 2008.

7. If it was re-migrated in step 4, or if the updating you did in step 6 did not include both HTML and binary files, then you confirm by direct experiment that you have correctly adjusted the configuration of your SFTP software, so that you will be able to resume authoring activities promptly on the new production server when the migration is complete:
   • upload at least one HTML file to check text file uploading; if you choose a file that is already part of your subsite, be sure there is a minor difference, so that you can confirm that the uploaded version is being displayed (don't neglect to scroll all the way down, to confirm that the page is complete); and

   • upload at least one binary file (e.g., graphic image, Word .doc file, etc.), so that you can confirm correct operation in binary mode, too.

   • If you uploaded files that are not part of your site, delete them from the staging server after you have confirmed that they display properly.

8. You inspect your pages on the staging server to see whether they appear to be intact.
   • Look for spaces inside of words (e.g., "spa ces" instead of "spaces"): this is often caused by prior problems in uploading or downloading files -- problems that have resulted in the insertion of bogus line-breaks, which re-wrap to display as spaces in text. Unfortunately, bogus line-breaks inside tags may well prevent correct interpretation of the tag by the browser, so do check carefully the rest of any page that exhibits extra spaces inside words.

   • In order to detect any problems that might result from the square brackets and leading dot punctuation issue, described above in the warning section just before the start of this check list, be sure to follow links to and to examine pages inside sub-subsites.

   • If your pages use HTML "frames," then you should check the code to ensure that all references to your own pages and files use relative specifications, so that they will work without change on both wws2 and ww2.

   If you detect any problems, contact us by e-mail to webteam@ohio.edu, so that we can work with you to address them, without feeling the anxiety that we would feel if those problem pages were already visible to the public from the new production server.

9. As soon as you are satisfied, you send an e-mail to webteam@ohio.edu, telling us that the copy of your subsite on the new staging server is ready for deployment, and you stop updating both the new and the old servers, until step 4 of the Deployment stage.

1. After learning from you that the Pre-Migration stage is complete, OIT staff copy your subsite from the new staging server to the new production server.

2. OIT staff use privileged access (bypassing the load-balancer) to confirm that your pages are displaying properly from the new production server (you can't do that, because at this stage the load-balancer is still redirecting everyone to the old server's copy of your subsite).

3. OIT staff adjust the server and load-balancer configurations so that the world no longer sees your pages from the old server, but instead sees them from the new server. From now on, everyone looking at your pages will see that their browser displays the URL with the uniform server name, www.ohio.edu.

4. You resume updating, using SFTP with your OAK login ID and password to connect to the production server, ww2.ohio.edu, but otherwise configured as you did for the staging server during the Pre-Migration stage.

5. If that was the last subsite or sub-subsite controlled by your account on the old server, www.ohiou.edu, then OIT staff will disable that account, but will not immediately erase the disk files.

6. After a short delay, to permit problems to manifest and be solved, OIT staff will erase the disk files and remove your account from the old server. We have included steps 2 and 4 of the Pre-Migration stage, in large part, so that you will have those archival copies of your files available if obscure problems surface only after we have erased the old server's files.