Disk /dev/sdd: 4041 MB, 4041211392 bytes
125 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1018 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7750 * 512 = 3968000 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xddeb26e6
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 1 61664 3944719 b W95 FAT32

Now unmount it by typing:

sudo umount /dev/sdd1

Afterwards, format the USB stick using the following code. Remember to spell the USB device properly. This command is quite dangerous, it will erase everything on the drive specified.

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd

Now that the USB stick is formatted, a new partition has to be create on it. Type:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdd

to create a partition on the USB stick. This will be the new sdd1 partition. After this is done it has to be formatted again using:

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdd1

to get the ext3 file system on it.

Now then, label the new ext3 USB stick using the command:

sudo e2label /dev/sdd1 usb_backup

Automatically mounting the USB stick when the server reboots

After the usual backup of the /etc/fstab, edit it to include a new line at end:

/dev/sdd1 /media/usb-backup ext3 user,rw 0 0

Create a new directory ‘usb-backup’ and make it readable and writable by the user:

sudo mkdir /media/usb-backup
sudo chmod 755 /media/usb-backup

Use sudo mount -a to mount the drive.

This USB stick can now act as a backup disk.

Install ‘hwinfo’. Its quite an useful tool as it can check the configuration of any hardware. Refer the manpage of more information.

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

To display details of the network cards on the system, type:

sudo hwinfo --netcard

Alternatively one can use

lshw -C network

to display details of the network card. Read manpage for more on lshw.

sudo apt-get install whowatch

free

free command displays amount of total, free and used RAM in the system, as well as shoing information on shared memory, buffers, cached memory and swap space used by the Linux kernel.

vmstat

vmstat reports report virtual memory statistics, which has information about processes, swap, free, buffer and cache memory, paging space, disk IO activity, traps, interrupts, context switches and CPU activity. With vmstat command, administrators can has instantaneous reports on memory usage.

top

top command displays dynamic real-time view of the running tasks managed by kernel and system information in Linux system. The memory usage stats by top command include real-time live total, used and free physical memory and swap memory with their buffers and cached memory size respectively.

ps

ps command reports a snapshot on information of the current active processes. Advantage of ps command is that system admins will be able to see where the memory is used. ps will show the percentage of memory resource that is used by each process or task running in the system. With this command, top memory hogging processes can be identified.

1. The database

a. Creating the backup

The very first thing that I had to do was to create a safe backup of my MW database. This database now contains all the data in my MW including images, user settings, comments and chats. To do this in MySQL I used the following syntax:

mysqldump -u username -p databasename > database.sql

b. Creating a new database
This created a file containing all the data from the old database. I used a copy of this file to create a new database in my new server. To do this  I had to first create the database and then import the data using the following syntax:

mysql -u root -p new_database_name < database.sql

c. Creating a database user

Then I created an account that has access to this database and gave it permissions.  Details about this new user can be found in the LocalSettings.php file of the MW.  Details about the database connection can also be found in this file. For example:

$wgDBserver         = “localhost”;
$wgDBname           = “database_name”;
$wgDBuser           = “username”;
$wgDBpassword       = “password”;
$wgDBtype           = “mysql”;

I used the following commands to give proper permission to the new MySQL user account.

GRANT DELETE,INSERT,SELECT,UPDATE ON new_database_name.* TO ‘username’@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
GRANT DELETE,INSERT,SELECT,UPDATE ON new_database_name.* TO ‘username’@unnionline.com IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

2. Moving MW files

Now that the database is properly setup, the next step was to move the MW from the old server to the new one. I recommend anybody using this technique to stick with the original directory structure. I used ssh to do the transferring.

3. Configuring apache

Now that my MW is ready to go online, I had edit my apache configuration file to recognize and host the wiki. Details about configuring apache can be found at http://www.apache.org/