'simple' migration DR test and upgrade

[malenfant]

Hi folks, I've just taken over maintanance of our customer forum only to find that nobody here has any knowledge of maintaining or supporting it, we have no backup/disaster recovery plan to speak of and it is on a pretty decrepit version which restricts my abilities to do some of the things I want. My plan is to recover everything to another server, thus proving DR, then run a test upgrade on that system, then the live upgrade. But I'm used to all microsoft houses and I'm horribly new to both mysql and PHP.

Thus far I have done the following

• Intalled latest stable releases of mysql and PHP.
• Restored the DB from the live server.
• Copied the web pages from the live server.
• Created a new virtual directory on IIS
• Added a new mapping for .PHP and pointed it to PHP.exe
• Added index.php to the documents.
• Edited config.php to use a valid user on the new system (root) - hey, it's just a test...

But I get a CGI application timeout message when I try and view the test system...

I suspect this is fairly simple but I'm aware I'm lacking some base knowledge on mysql/PHP. until I can successfully recover to this box and test the upgrade I'm not touching my live system :/

Any thoughts would be welcome

Edit: ah sorry, and it's v2.3.5 that I'm currently on.

[peterska2]

First of all, don't use PHP5 or MySQL5 as vBulletin 2.x will not work in these conditions. You will need to use both PHP4 and MySQL4.

Now we've got that out of the way, and saved the problems from trying to get it to work from happening, time for instructions on moving a copy of your forums to another server.

Information about moving servers can be found in our manual here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/moving_servers

Just omit the bits about deleting the current site.

You will need to ensure that your test site is password protected in the form of a htaccess file, in accordance with the license agreement.

[malenfant]

Ok, thanks, that get's me rolling again for now. I'll see where I get to. thanks for the speedy reply.