The day we retired an old application server and how it impacted my moodle instances

Yesterday we took an old application server offline.  Shortly afterward a couple of our customers, including our help desk notified me that the site was down.

I checked both of the sites that lived on the server and they were fine.  Then I checked the splash page and it was down.

Que up the blood pressure gauge.

The DNS of the splash page was still mapped to the old IP address.

 The splash page that did not load.

In hindsight, it looks like I had planned for this day, replicating the splash page on our moodle server using php.  But, it was not yet in play, as the DNS was still pointing to the splash.cfm page - created in ColdFusion and living on the now retired server (internal ip of 10.2.28.23).

 Naturally, this caused a problem.  The owner of the DNS quickly notified us that the site "entryway" was not up.  I would call the "entryway" the splash or portal page that links to two moodle instances.

What we DID NOT DO, that should have been done proactively is to edit and update the DNS entry.  If I had remembered that the splash page was still being served from 10.2.28.23 - then yes, we would have looked first at the DNS and saw that it was still pointing to the ColdFusion version of the page.


The solution steps

 I gave Jeff the new IP address and the path to the file to load and he said the DNS can only be mapped to the root of the server, could not use "/" backslashes.   Jeff updated the DNS to the new IP and pointed in into the root of the server.  I went back to find the file at the root of the server and found index.php - with a javascript redirect command in it.

Script in the index.php at the site webroot.

script>
    //alert('Opps, redirecting');
    window.location = 'http://studentmoodle.accelerateu.org/student/portal';

/script>

The morals of the story?

1. Make sure you update DNS entries to remove old IPs before turning the server off
2. You cannot point into a "sub path using backslashes" when pathing to the root of the server
3. Use Javascript or php to handle the re-directing to a site home page that lives somewhere off the root of the server.