Server upgrade

[Sir Edward]

Just a head's up that there may be some downtime for the forum in the near future. I haven't chosen when yet, but I'm going to upgrade the linux version on the server to something more modern. When I do this, there will be an outage for all of my websites, including the forum.

In the short-term, I'm going to do a reboot so I can mount the new OS and start doing some configuration quietly in the background. I hate to lose my nearly 3-year uptime on the server, but alas reboots have to happen.

This will be the first time I've pulled the rug out from under the entire server since I started it, so I have a lot of little things to check and verify. I'm expecting to have lots of unanticipated problems. I have to copy over the database, webserver configuration, user accounts, back-end scripts, configure a different email server, and so on.

So anyway, just a head's up. If you try to access the forum and can't get in, I'm probably reconfiguring things. I'm not sure if I'll do this during the week or on the weekend.

[Joshua Santana]

Thanks for the warning Sir Edward!  Do let us know via Facebook when the Forum will be back in business! 

[Sir Edward]

No worries, when I have the actual outage, my plan is to have it down for no more than a few hours. Depending on your schedule, you may never notice.

[Sir Edward]

OK, my preliminary reboot is done. So much for my 916 days of uptime (2.5 years). lol.

Like I said, I don't know when I'll do the main upgrade, it depends on when I have a few contiguous hours to work on it.

[Joshua Santana]

Thanks for the update Sir Edward, do keep us posted!

[Sir Edward]

OK, so here's the plan. I'm hoping to dive into this Saturday morning, with the whole day ahead of me in case things blow up in my face. The forum will definitely be down for some length of time, or even be intermittently visible.

If things go horribly awry, I'll put it all back the way it was and take another stab at it some other time.

If things go much more smoothly than I expect, it'll all be back up and humming along well before lunch.

In reality, it'll probably be somewhere in between, with the big pieces up and running but little details elsewhere that are still broken... meaning, the forum will be up, but some of my back-end stuff with email and DNS and backups and the like might still be hosed. I can deal with cleaning that stuff up later if it comes to that, since the primary work on the server is the web services and the database that runs under them.

It's not often that I rip out the operating system and replace it. I expect much cussing and hair-pulling to ensue, even though I have it pretty well planned out.

[Sir James A]

My sympathies in advance, having done a few server upgrades in the past.

[Sir Wolf]

good thing i gotta work sat morning. dont wanna go crazy when its down hahaha

[Joshua Santana]

good thing i gotta work sat morning. dont wanna go crazy when its down hahaha

Hear! Hear! 

[Sir Edward]

So far so good. I will probably be fixing small issues for days. But the bigger pieces (the forum primarily) look to be working.

Lots of little headaches along the way of course. The OS starts out really stripped down, so I didn't even have compilers or downloaders for the packages I needed, except for "yum". But little by little, I got things in place. It's been about 2.5 hours so far now.

More to do, but now I can take a deep breath and relax a little.

[Sir Edward]

Over the course of the day I've managed to fix a lot of the little outstanding details. I'll probably find more as time goes on, and I know I've neglected a couple (graphing and analysis type stuff). But email is working again, got all the little services like FTP, POP, rsync, and so on working, verified a bunch of the startup and scheduled tasks still do what they're supposed to, and so on.

It all went pretty smoothly, except for a couple of brain-farts on my part. All I can say is THANK GOODNESS I know what I'm doing, or this could have been a nightmare.

[Sir Wolf]

and we thank you sir!

[Sir James A]

and we thank you sir!

Indeed! Any server upgrade that doesn't involve a screw driver mounted in a vise, with a lawn mower blade on it, is a successful upgrade!

[Sir Edward]

Well, I feel stupid. After doing the upgrade, apparently I didn't finish setting up email aliases, so the forum was unable to email me. It's been emailing everyone else, just not me. Figures.

[Ian]

Did you make it so the forum content is on a secure connection now?