Forum Management Announcements

Guinness · October 15, 2009, 09:14:30 AM

FYI: Leo, who has done us all a great service by managing this forum for so long, will be finding more productive uses for his time. So we're doing a transition by the end of which I'll be doing the day-to-day management tasks, which mostly means performing the occasional upgrade and backing up the database.

As part of that effort I want to pick a time to do a regular backup automatically (so I don't have to remember to do it manually). I've got a script written to do that, but it seems to slow the forum down a bit.

Knowing we have users around the world, picking the best time window is difficult. I've noticed that traffic is generally slow after 11pm (Eastern US Time) on Friday nights, so I think that's the time I'll shoot for to do backups and when necessary, updates. So unless there is any objection, consider that the new weekly "maintenance" window.

Guinness · December 04, 2009, 11:48:02 AM

There is a security update for the Forum software. I'm hoping to apply it tonight after the backup is done.

That means I'll be applying it after 0400 GMT (2300 US Eastern) tonight. The board will be unavailable while I do that.

Guinness · December 05, 2009, 11:50:13 AM

The bad news: I couldn't update the forum last night.

The good news: This made me duplicate it on my home server, which validated that all my backups would work if we ever needed them, and now I have an Nverse development environment. :)

I've figured out what I was doing wrong and I plan to apply the updates tonight at 11 pm EST (which is 0400 GMT). I'll put the forum in 'maintenance mode' for a few minutes while I do that. I don't expect it will take more than 15 minutes to do.

Guinness · December 05, 2009, 09:15:57 PM

Update done. Continue with regularly scheduled programming.

Guinness · November 07, 2010, 06:28:33 AM

At 1 PM EST today, which is 1800 GMT if I'm counting on my fingers right, I'm going to put the forums in maint. mode for a few minutes while I apply the SMF 1.1.12 update. Please be aware, etc.

Guinness · November 07, 2010, 11:08:42 AM

This is done.

Guinness · July 11, 2011, 07:56:45 AM

If my kids and work cooperate, I'm hoping to be able to move this forum to a new webhost by next weekend, probably on Friday night, June 22 my time (say about 0300 GMT). When I move it, I hope to accomplish the following:

1. Upgrade to SMF2
2. Reorganize and archive all the Nverse 3 content
3. Enable some more anti-spammer features.

Why will I be doing this? Maddox is no longer active and there is no need for he and Leo to be paying for this forum when they have more or less nothing to do with it. Also, as I've been the primary maintainer for some time, it would be nice to be on a host that speaks a language I speak.

How will it work? Ahead of time I'll lower the Time To Live on the DNS entry to something appropriately short so that it won't take days for the entry to update on everyone's DNS server. Then when the time comes, I'll put this forum in maintenance mode, change DNS, copy the data to the new forum, perform the upgrade and reorg, and take the new forum out of maintenance mode. The new site should be sufficiently obvious that you'll know if you got it. I'll post the expected time to return to service on the maintenance page.

How will I roll this change back if I have to? Rollback will mean simply changing DNS back to the old server.

Guinness · July 11, 2011, 09:10:31 AM

Actually, now that I look, the dns records for the nameservers themselves are set to time out after a full day. So, we may need to live with seeing a maintenance page for up to 24 hours while the mechanism works. I don't think this is a big deal, but it is an annoyance.

Guinness · July 14, 2011, 08:32:18 PM

Well that was interesting. We're back on the air.

It seems that once the old webhost noticed it was no longer the registrar of record for the domain that it dropped the record. This is something Leo warned me about, but I was hoping they'd let us have more time.

At any rate, we're up and running on the new host. I was able to grab a dump of the db from the old one and import it, so we should be up to date.

I believe that most users will see the new ip from DNS reasonably quickly, since it didn't exist for a few hours there.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Please PM me if you see anything amiss.

Guinness · July 16, 2011, 01:10:07 PM

Found the little news item feature at the top. :)

I did a test SMF 2.0 upgrade on my parallel env. at home, and it went well, so I'm planning to do similarly to the live site tonight at 10 pm my time (-4 from GMT, so 0200 GMT).

When I do that, I'll also be reorganizing to move all the Nverse 3 content to an archive section. The upgrade itself should take about 10 minutes. The reorganizing should take quite a bit longer, maybe 45 minutes.

If you are on twitter, please follow @Navalism. I'll announce there when I'm done.