EXISTING SITES ONLY

This section applies only to existing Reciprocal Net sites that are upgrading to site software 0.9.0.  It is assumed that these sites plan to upgrade their operating systems, and optionally also their computer hardware, as part of the same process.

These instructions assume that a “forklift” upgrade is underway; that is, that you intend to back up the data from your old Reciprocal Net site running site software 0.6.2, carry that data to a new system, and then restore the existing data to the new system running site software 0.9.0.  The “new” system may be new computer hardware with a new operating system, or it may be the same computer hardware with a freshly-formatted hard disk drive and a freshly-installed operating system.  An upgrade-in-place of operating system, without an intervening hard disk format, is not recommended.

For your convenience, Reciprocal Net has created a backup utility to assist you in preserving the data on your old system.  It is available on the Internet but unfortunately did not ship with site software 0.6.2.  Go to your old system, log in as root, and go to a command line.  Then type the following command (all on one line):

.  The backup program is downloaded from Reciprocal Net’s web site and executed immediately.  (Experienced system administrators may prefer to download the script and examine its contents before running it, and should feel free to do so.)  As the program runs, the recipnetd daemon and the mysqld daemon are halted.  The computer may trundle for a few minutes or perhaps an hour, and eventually an archive file is created in the /root/ directory of the file system.

Navigate to the /root/ directory and find the archive file.  It should have a name of the form recipnet-backup-2008-01-08.tar.gz , depending on the current date.  Copy this file to a safe place on some removable media or on some other computer system.  Copy it to several places if possible.  This archive file contains all the data and metadata for your Reciprocal Net site.  You do not want to lose it by mistake.

At this point the recipnetd daemon on your old system is halted.  It must remain this way.  All of your site’s information about the state of the Reciprocal Net Site Network is stored inside the archive file.  You will transfer that network state to the new system and then bring the new system online.  Any deviation from this sequence of events would confuse other Reciprocal Net member servers and would risk destabilizing the whole Reciprocal Net Site Network.

With your archive file now stored in a safe place, continue with these instructions to prepare your new system to act as a Reciprocal Net site.