After that was done, I upgraded the server OS from Fedora Core 4 (old, dusty, and a slightly broken OS image to boot!), up to Fedora Core 6 (w00t!).

When I first went with FC4, it was the best my host could offer. (The alternative was an almost unusably broken OpenSUSE 9.something). It had PHP 5.0.23 installed, which sucked beyond belief (seriously PHP guys, not a cool release), so I had to temporarily downgrade to PHP4. I then had to spend ages figuring my way MANUALLY round various RPM repositories, until I could find YUM (YellowDog Update Manager) which, for whatever reason, was not on the FC4 OS image! Gah.

After that bundle of joy, I had to then find appropriate repositories which were still actively hosting FC4 material for the x86_64 architecture. After days of hunting, I eventually found the life-saving (and excellently named) "Atomic Rocket Turtle", which had what I needed, so I got my crusty FC4 updated to the latest and greatest in AMP technology. Woohoo!

Now that I've upgraded to FC6, I was worried that I'd have to do the whole thing ALLLLL over again. Thankfully, YUM is already installed, and Apache and MySQL are pretty-much up to date. PHP is only version 5.1, which ain't great (although it's workable)... but thankfully, people are still making RPM's for FC6 x86_64.

The restoration process of all my data seeeeems OK so far... had to nip into the restoration 'map' file (thingy created by Plesk - my control panel software) to correct something it didn't like (it was insistent on a shared IP instead of exclusive... not that it makes much different, since I've only got 1 address and I'm the only client!).

Now I've got to update Plesk and make sure the firewall is OK in Virtuozzo (server virtualization software). Last few times I tried on FC4, it complained of a misconfiguration... probably some buried setting gone wrong... and I had no idea how to fix. Hopefully it's all good now.