Table of Contents

Activation of root access

For technical reasons, Gandi AI does not allow you to have total access to the management of your server (see: Connecting to your server with Gandi AI). If you need to have root access, you can activate root access at any time by permanently disabling Gandi AI.

This section explains how to activate root access when you are leaving Gandi AI, and will show you the first few tasks that you may wish to perform when you first take over your server.

WARNING! If you activate root access, you will no longer have access to Gandi AI! This action is irreversible. Gandi AI will not function on this server once the operation has been performed!

The activation process

Activation of root access is done from your server's management interface.

To proceed, simply click on “Disable Gandi AI” in the “System Administration” section:

Define a password for root access and validate:

Root activation can take a few minutes.

Connecting to your now-expert server

Once you have activated root access to your server, you can only access your server in expert mode. As you had previously used Gandi AI, here is a summary of how you can access your server as root.

The tool that you need to use to access your server as root is the SSH console. Note, however that the default configuration of the SSH service is such that you cannot directly log in as root, you need to first log in as an intermediary system user.

The account name that was created under Gandi AI is 'admin”. This is the account that you must use to connect to your server via SSH. The 'admin' user uses the password that you specified when you activated root access, and you can connect with this user now.

Once you have connected to your server, you can use a command to open a root shell connection to your server.

For more information, see ssh-console.

Updating your server

This is not the best way to go. if you want an updated version of your server you should ideally create a new virtual machine (VM) (which takes just a few minutes), transfer your data onto the new VM, and migrate any web resources (i.e. update DNS to point to the right VM) when you want/are ready. This method is far less risky than the method described below.

Since our Gandi AI hosting solution is based on an older Ubuntu version, you may want to update your distribution to a more recent version. You should choose one that is supported by the Ubuntu community.

By default, the servers used to install software packages for Gandi AI are the Gandi mirror servers on this page.

Gandi AI uses an older version of Ubuntu, and so the repositories are in the ones called ubuntu-old. To upgrade, then, it is therefore necessary to use the repositories of a newer version.

To modify the list of sources used for your server, you need to launch the following: 

cd /etc/apt && sudo sed -i "s/ubuntu-old/ubuntu/" sources.list && sudo sed -i "s/gutsy/hardy/" sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

This command will modify the “sources” file so that it uses the new repositories of the Hardy distribution.

Once your distribution has been updated, you can reboot your server and continue with the upgrade: 

cd /etc/apt && sudo sed -i "s/hardy/jaunty/" sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

Likewise, to update the system to Ubuntu 9.04 (“Karmic”), once the upgrade has been completed, you need to reboot your system and launch the following command: 

cd /etc/apt && sudo sed -i "s/jaunty/karmic/" sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade 
 cd /etc/apt && sudo sed -i "s/karmic/lucid/" sources.list && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade 
sudo echo "dev /dev tmpfs rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
 update-rc.d -f ondemand remove

Note: If you move the files, do not leave them in a subdirectory of /etc/init/ otherwise they will be run.

Once you have obtained root access to your VPS, you become autonomous in its configuration, and Gandi's support team can only help you in the event that there is a network problem. They cannot directly intervene in the configuration of your services.

Updating your server (by creating a new VPS directly)

Your server is out of date: the operating system is too old and the packages are obsolete. You want to update your system.

Rather than updating with aptitude or apt-get dist-upgrade which can lead to time-consuming problems (especially if the version change is too large), we recommend creating a new virtual server in parallel to the old one.

Here is a migration example:

  1. Lower the TTL of the domain affected by the migration. This will allow you to change the DNS entry to reflect the IP address of the new server at the right moment.
  2. List the packages installed on your current server: dpkg -l | awk '{ print $2 }' > malistpackage.txt, then copy it to the new server,
  3. Reinstall the list of packages as desired
  4. Copy whatever configuration files you need onto the new server,
  5. Copy your application data,
  6. Verify that the services start properly and that everything works as expected,
  7. If all is running smoothly, change the DNS entry to point to the new server,
  8. If a problem appears, you can temporarily switch back to the old server at the DNS level for the time it takes to fix the problem
  9. If everything is still ok after moving into production, you can delete the old server.

The advantages of this method: