How to Change the location of your Curator Environment

Things to Consider

When you have an existing Curator location for all our resources and environment and you need to change this to a new location, there are things to think about that need correcting:

1) The new location Path

2) The new location Name (which will make up part of the path)

3) The current location of your Hi Res Online content (if they exist in the default Online folder in your current Environment and need moving)

4) The current location of your Proxy/Web Proxy content (if they exist in the default Proxy folder in your current Environment and need moving)

5) SV Server pointing at the new location for the proxy store

6) Website configs to point at locations for playback of HLS Proxies

7) DB HiresPaths and OriginalPaths looking at new locations for all assets if moved

8) Mediastore path configurations for custom paths pointing at the new/old locations, i.e. transform file locations or EPR's

Resolution 

To change the Curator Environment location you will first need to make sure there is some downtime while the below is completed, we don't want assets being moved/changed/added while we potentially migrate content.

1) & 2)

To change the location is done by updating this in PE, specifically in the " Configure Basic Settings" section under the Home tab.

First we recommend you copy your entire existing physical folder structure and paste it into the new location. (You can find the top level of this location from the PE basic settings configuration under the "Full Path to Curator Folder" location and from there copy the Curator folder and environment sub folder)

e.g. \\Myserver\IPV\Curator\Prod

copy to 

\\Myserver\Newlocation\Curator\Prod

Note that you should have copied at the Curator folder and the sub-folder specific to your change e.g. Prod and not Dev

If you are also changing the name of your Environment, you should copy the content below your existing environment location e.g. files and sub folders under "curator\Prod\" and create a new folder structure at the new location using the name you want to change to e.g. "curator\Prod2"

Full example

Copy files from here: \\myserver\ipv\curator\prod

to

\\myserver\newlocation\curator\prod2

Having changed the physical location, we need to update Process engine, using the example structure we want to change on the basic settings page:

Environment from Value "Prod" to "Prod2"

and "Full Path to Curator" from

\\myserver\ipv

to

\\myserver\newlocation

3) & 4)

It is important to understand having moved your environment folder you may have also moved a number of key file physical locations, such as the online store, the proxy store and the resource stores. If you wish to correct the paths so they all point to the copied content in the new location we need to do some adjusting.

New ingests will go into the new structure location, and since we already copied the Online/Proxy etc to this location, fixing them so we cant completely delete the originals is a huge storage saving exercise, so we should.

This in turn removes any confusion over needing to reference old stores vs new ones.

You could leave the files in the old location, if this is required, then you can safely delete the copies just made in the new location.

Specifically the online folder and Proxy folder.

If you are full migrating, then having copied the files all to the new Env we can safely delete the old Env folder structure (recommend doing this at the very end though!!)

5)

SV Server is pretty flexible when it comes to proxy storage locations, we can leave the old one in, and just reference it as a second option, the first option will always take precedence.

Open SV Server Properties client and browse to the Paths tab

Here you should see your existing Path setup to point at the old Env Proxy folder. Copy the path string in this.

Create a new path key and paste the old key in, but changing the start to be replaced by your new location as part of the path e.g. \\myserver\newlocation\curator\Prod2

so the path will end up like this:

\\myserver\newlocation\curator\prod2\proxies\

Click save and now you will see two path keys. At the bottom of the client, you can choose the move up option to put your key at the top of the list.

You can delete the old option now, but this can be done at the end of the process, or we can leave it in for legacy remembering purposes.

Now the physical files we copied into the new location in the Proxy folder can be used in playback.

6)

For websites and panel proxy playback,we want to be sure playback still works, depending on the flavor of setup you just want to make sure the new location is being used. Don;t forget to point your paths to the right place. If done as following this guide and using the IIS virtual folder method for sharing the HLS location, you shouldn't need to change anything but the virtual folder path we point to using our "Proxy" virtual folder alias.

7)

Now we have physically moved files, we need to make sure that the curatordb paths are all correct, typically we will want to make sure the default values for HiResPath and OriginalPath are updated to point at the new locations for each asset.

Be sure to back up your curator DB now!

You can run a simple query in MySQL workbench against the curator db to check the value you are after, using this as an example:

SELECT * FROM curatordb.metadatavalues where value LIKE ('\\\\\\\\Myserver\\\\ipv\\\\Curator\\\\\Prod%');

This will show you all path based on the old folder structure used as an example, you would need to amend for your specific folder path.

You can find the examples of the HiResPath and OrginalPath by searching the metadataname table for the name_id of each of these doing this

SELECT * FROM curatordb.metadatanames where name = 'HiResPath' or name = 'OriginalPath';

this will give you the name_id number for each, then search the metadatavalues table for examples of this folder structures using:

SELECT * FROM curatordb.metadatavalues where name_id = 29 or name_id = 65;

Once you are happy with the folder structure pattern from the old location, we want to replace part fo the string for all assets to point at the new location, with losing all the files names etc, we can do so by using this query, again you should be sure that the paths are the right ones. Note in the LIKE statement we have to escape the \ twice using more \'s so for \ you want 4 \\\\, for \\ you'd want 8 \\\\\\\\.

In the actual string we are replacing we only need to escape once, so halve the values, e.g. \ is only \\ and \\ would only be \\\\. You also notice in the LIKE part of the statement we have a % at the end of the path, this indicates that specifically the string before it is always at the START of the value we are looking for.

If you wanted to match a string that is contained in the value you can add a % at the start as well like '%somestring%' or if only looking for the last part of the string you can only add it at the start e.g. '%somestring'.

UPDATE curatordb.metadatavalues
SET value = REPLACE (value, '\\\\myserver\\ipv\\Curator\\Prod', '\\\\myserver\\newlocation\\Curator\\Prod2')  WHERE value LIKE ('\\\\\\\\myserver\\\\ipv\\\\Curator\\\\\Prod%');

Running this query will update the part of the query at the start with the second value and only where it  matches our like statement.

Once all paths are changed you will need to re-index solr!

8)

In PE you should also check all your mediastores for paths that would be changed when changing the environment, Automatically a number of auto created paths will be updated, but some paths that were manually added or are configurable, like transform paths or EPR paths should be checked manually and updated.

As a rule of thumb you should go through each media store and triple check any path keys and their values are pointing a the right location.

Now depending on if you did move everything you can safely delete the old structure on physical disc thus halving the storage being used.

NOTE: if the environment you are changing has a more complicated structure, it will require more specific changes for locations, but this is a rule of thumb guide for basics