Progress.

Way back in November, I lost about six weeks of lifetime to a six-hour physical migration of database servers. It did go without a hitch: the fact that there were intermittent downtimes was due to ARP caches and the like that I have no control over, but it was very… interesting, in the chinese proverb sense.
Today, I (somewhat secretly) moved the production database for our pages from one running server to another. The software update we have done in December meant that I could zig-zag from primary DB to read-only failover, copy the primary DB to the new server, change the config, and fail-back to the new locaiton of the primary server, all the while serving pages (at least read-only).
Dude.
Took me about thirty minutes, because my config automation isn't really good at handling change of IP, so I boggled why the new primary wouldn't come up. At the same time, this is much less of a cause for panic when you're still serving pages. Go me.