Re: [Sks-devel] Moving SKS to a different host

[Pete Stephenson]

On 8/3/2014 3:03 PM, Tyler Schwend wrote:
> Building the sks database from a dump takes a very long time, a lot
> of disk space, and a lot of CPU. Is there a way to just move the
> whole BDB from one host to another? I am switching hosts.

I'm not sure if it's recommended, but I've done that successfully (where
"successfully" is defined as "it doesn't seem to have broken anything yet").

On two Ubuntu 14.04 systems, both with SKS 1.1.4, it was pretty easy:

1. Stop the SKS service on the old system: "sudo service sks stop"

2. Install SKS on the new host, if I haven't done so already: "sudo
apt-get install sks". Using the package automatically creates the
"debian-sks" user. If you're compiling from source your mileage may vary.

3. Copy /var/lib/sks/* from the old to the new host (I did this using
rsync, but you can use whatever you wish).

4. Ensure that the directory and its contents on the new host have
proper permissions: for example, "sudo chown -R debian-sks:debian-sks
/var/lib/sks/"

5. On the new host edit /etc/default/sks, set initstart=yes. Ensure that
/etc/sks/membership and /etc/sks/sksconf are setup appropriately.

6. Start SKS on the new host: "sudo service sks start"

I'm not sure how this procedure would differ if one were not using the
SKS version in the package manager.

Cheers!
-Pete