zengun

The collective Action Contre la Faim (action against hunger) held this event where every four seconds, as the two speakers spelled a name, a human figure dropped dead, to symbolize a death by hunger.

These figures were not part of the event, they were standing behind a tent.

The collective Action Contre la Faim (action against hunger) held this event where every four seconds, as the two speakers spelled a name, a human figure dropped dead, to symbolize a death by hunger.

The collective Action Contre la Faim (action against hunger) held this event where every four seconds, as the two speakers spelled a name, a human figure dropped dead, to symbolize a death by hunger.

The collective Action Contre la Faim (action against hunger) held this event where every four seconds, as the two speakers spelled a name, a human figure dropped dead, to symbolize a death by hunger.

The text above was written by an unknown person on the back of the collective’s banner.

If you can read this, then you’re reading a page served by a lighttpd instance in Paris.
More on the migration later…

Update : the whole thing. Hopefully this serves as a guide of sorts to whoever runs through the troubles I’ve faced.

Part I : fetching files

Using rsync over ssh, it was a no-brainer.
I just made sure that I had the same /home/$username on both hosts, in order to avoid editing some web apps’ config files to correct absolute paths.

Part II : setting up lighttpd

It was only after I was done that I noticed the lighttpd wiki has a cheat sheet to help you migrate from Apache.

Since I serve multiple sites, I went for a vhost setup using conditionnals, and then set each site’s accesslog, errorlog, and so on (so that my hostees could see their own access logs).

Mod_rewrite rules were another problem. You basically have to understand the rewrite rules that your apps generate (I can only hope you understand those you manually typed in), in order to simplify them and put them in the right order in lighttpd’s config file.
Also, since I didn’t care to remove .htaccess and .htpasswd files, I denied their access. They’re still useful for when an app (think WordPress or another CMS) wants to regenerate rules.

Part III : setting up PHP

Easy as pie with fastcgi in lighttpd. I took the occasion to harden its settings, and add stuff.
Each vhost runs PHP as suexec.

Part IV : struggling with tildas, aka using real utf-8 with MySQL

Here comes the part that took me ages to figure out. I made a dump of my databases, then when I loaded the dump on the new host I had double-encoded utf8. Both hosts are running MySQL 4.1, so I was rightly puzzled.
Turns out that, to have a future-proof MySQL setup I let it use utf-8 by default, while on most webhosts (including TextDrive) the default encoding is iso-8859-1, which leads to what I would call “fake utf-8″ content.
There were multiple solutions to this problem: I could set MySQL’s encoding to iso-8859-1 (no!), I could set the database with the problem to use iso-8859-1 (no!), or I could tell whichever app depended on “fake utf-8″ in utf-8 tables to use iso-8859-1 for its communication with MySQL.
This can be done with the SQL command SET NAMES 'latin1' at the beginning of the app’s execution.

In my case, WordPress was the app that used fake utf-8, so in order not to modify the code everytime I would upgrade WP, I made a simple plugin (latin1-fix.php), activated it, and voilà!, my text was readable again!

Part V : sleeping

Thank $DEITY there was no part V!

La dernière question à me poser en ce moment : « quoi de neuf ? »

• Réponse a) : « Bôh tu sais, taf redevenu assez tranquillou, vie pépère, tout ça. »
• Réponse b) : « J’attends je ne sais quoi, je ne sais pas par quel bout finir tous ces trucs, je ne touche pratiquement plus au clavier chez moi à cause de la douleur, côté cœur c’est du petit n’importe quoi un vrai défilé d’aveugles dont les borgnes rois sont morts pendus comme patience et longueur de temps, j’ai envie de vacances mais je n’ai nulle part où aller et il est hors de question que je fasse un voyage organisé avec un car d’inconnus en bobs dans des hôtels avec piscine à deux pas de la mer où on ne se baignerait pas, j’ai commandé un appareil photo que je n’aurais jamais le temps d’utiliser, l’espresso fait de moins en moins d’effet, j’ai (re)découvert Nosfell mais tu t’en bas les couilles parce que tu connais pas alors tu hoches la tête tu n’es pas curieux et tu vas me bassiner avec Pink Floyd ou les Pixies, cette Guinness fait des petites bulles c’est atroce j’avais pas remarqué qu’ils l’avaient en poudre et pas en pression, je pensais aller à Londres ce weekend mais la SNCF ne l’entendais pas de cette oreille, les gens me rabâchent qu’en Corse c’est la guerre civile et qu’on devrait être contents de la continuité territoriale cette arnaque et qu’on ne se comprend pas entre deux villages le tout à base de on-m’a-dit, “on” devrait fermer sa putain de gueule ça me changerait un peu, cette rencontre impersonnelle me fait chier, je n’ai pas envie de te raconter tout ça devant ces gens pour qui je serai toujours l’étranger, celui à qui on demande pas pourquoi il pense différemment parce qu’après tout il est pas de notre monde ça se comprend surtout tolérons la différence au lieu d’essayer de la comprendre ou de la remettre en question, allez salut et ne va pas te faire voir je ne te hais point. »

Observation empirique : réponse a).
Vous n’êtes que des êtres humains après tout, et je ne vous hais point.

Je l’ai dit hier soir : les frites sont Web 2.0.