Chaning subdomain

crossing all the I's and dotting all teh T's for sundomain changes

[bailywolf]

I'm with a US university, and I'll soon be getting approval to change the subdomain we use for one of our divisions, and I want to make durned sure I know all the ins and outs of the process- and what might get hosed by the change.

Beyond registering the new subdomain through Uni administration and getting our DNS's pointing traffic to our IP, I wanted to make sure the change wouldn't break any of our web applications, sites, or services.

I've gone through our pages fine-toothed, and weeded out all absolute URL's referencing the old subdomain, making them all relative.

I've ID'd the redirects in Apache which will need to be changed, and I've marked down the ServerName for change as well. As far as I can ascertain, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and php itself all deal with LocalHost or the box's IP rather than its name or the domain name, so they should be fine regardless of the changeover.

The box itself is an IBM iSeries running i5/OS with PHP via Zend Core for i5/OS. We have IBMs's native HTTP server (based on Apache) as our front-end, and it ProxyPasses to our application server which runs in IBM's PASE environment within the i5/OS operating system (it basically behaves like AIX).

Am I missing anything here?

I've never done a subdomain change, and I'm sweating it a little bit... if the sites go down, if outside links break, or if users can't google out to the pages like they normally do, then someone is going to hide an ill-tempered gilamonster under my desk, and laugh mockingly as I writhe around in pain when it savages my toes. I honestly, I have gorgeous toes. Toes that should be preserved .

Little help?

Thanks,

-B

[mack]

Hi bailywolf,

Thanks for the question and welcome to WebmasterWorld...

From your question, is the existing subdomain all set up and running and all you want to do is change the name of the subdomain?...

example.example.com to example2.example.com?

If this is the case then you may get away with simply updating the servers httpd.conf file to reflect the name that is beign pointed to the htdocs folder.

As you mentioned php mysql ect do not rely on specific host locations, they simply refer to the box and it's localhost or ip address. Also what control panel if any do you have access to on the server?

Am I right in assuming you wish to rename a sub domain holding a functional website?

Mack.

[bailywolf]

Indeed- we have "example.school.edu" and we want "example2.school.edu"- with all the traffic running through the first to seamlessly pass to the second once the change is made.

I have pretty much total admin rights on the box in question- remote or hands-on. It's about thirty feet from my desk in our locked-down server room.

Also, is there a standard time/format for "this page has moved" type redirect messages?

Thanks,

-B