Installation moved to new server, but not working fully

Hi, all. This is a throwback to a topic I posted about a year and a half ago. The story, briefly:

- We've been hosting Xerte on some VMs with very old OSs that went out of support. We're needing to move them to something more recent and supported like Ubuntu.

- One of our in-house Unix experts has managed to migrate the installation of our test system over to an Ubuntu server by copying over the directories, database, web server config, and so on.

- It *sort* of works--it brings up the login screen, lets you log in, and so on. However, links to existing content don't work (workspaces show up as blank) and worse, the admin screen is broken entirely...none of the options display.

- As far as I can tell, the configuration of everything is identical. We've gone as far as changing the hostname of the machine so it matches the old one (i.e. what's in the site configuration). The only thing that's different that I can see is that SSL/TLS still needs configuring--would that break things like this?

I'm not proficient enough in PHP to go digging around in the internals to figure out what might be going on, unfortunately. Can anyone shed some light on this?

TL;DR: Moving our installation broke it, and we're at a loss as to why. Help!

Hi
in my experience there are a few things that often go wrong when moving from one server to another and also changing the system/OS/config at the same time:

Firstly make sure all the system requirements are in place
xot.xerte.org.uk/play.php?template_id=81#systemrequirements

Also that the directory ownership and permissions are correct e.g. easiest way is to make sure the apache user has ownership and write access to everything.

If it's a new server and new install of MySQL/MariaDB make sure the Xerte db user has full permissions and that the credentials match or are updated

You don't mention what you are using for authentication but by the fact that you see a login screen I'm guessing it's db authentication or Ldap authentication and probably the latter. If so make sure any DNS/Firewall rules allow the relevant communication and make sure the LDAP PHP extension is enabled and mappings still correct.

Possibly the most likely thing is that the directory paths on the new server have changed and if so there are values in the db that need to be changed accordingly. Typically there are two path values that would need to be corrected/updated.

I have to add that it always alarms me to hear about broken installations due to server moves. All of that should be tested first with a test server and test installation. Perhaps that's the case here but the fact that you mention you installation is broken - Help suggests perhaps it's the production server that is broken?

If the above doesn't work and you need urgent help I work directly with organisations all the time but I'm afraid that time is chargeable.

HTH
Ron

Hi, Ron.

Thanks for getting back to me. No, this is definitely our dev/test server, so it's not as bad as all that--it's confusing rather than catastrophic.

I'll go through your list of things to check and we'll see what might be going on. Thanks again!

Hi again, Ron.

I think we're back in business--there was an overlooked webserver configuration problem left over from the move that meant the application was trying to load some of its JavaScript over an insecure link, which meant a bunch of UI elements weren't loading at all.

Our Unix specialist has straightened that out, though, and now I can log in both as my usual account via LDAP and as the admin account. Thanks again for your help.

Glad you got it sorted.
Sounds like you aren't on Xerte 3.13x yet. I would recommend you upgrade and then take advantage of the new management roles.
HTH
Ron

Hi again, all.

Our Unix person has tried the move of the live version of our Xerte installation to a new Ubuntu server. The move itself went sucessfully--the application, database, file permissions, etc., are all copied over. However, going to the new server reroutes you to the setup page, which is a little disconcerting for an already-installed system.

I have a hunch that this is something to do with the hostname in the sitedetails table--the hostname for this server is temporarily different from the existing one while we test it and let the old one stay running. I don't know enough about Xerte internals to be sure, though. Can anyone shed any light on this and/or know how we might fix it? Thanks in advance!