Site Work

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,855
Mtigawi
I hate to give such a broad window but sometime today, Friday or Saturday I need to take the site down for about three hours.

The server we are on has a bad hard drive and need to move the data off to a new server. The issue is that since the server is so large that I'll only be able to move the database and core files. Since the hard drive is in a state of degradation it makes moving data slooooooooow, so even just the database will probably take an hour to transfer.

What this means is that it's going to a server without years of tweaks we've made to it. This might be good, this might be bad, but nothing we won't be able to fix reasonably quickly.

Some things that I think might not work 100%:
- avatars and uploaded images. There is a complex product behind the scenes handling this.
- spam. given our size we attract lots of spam. We stop 99.99% before it hits a thread. Historically I also block bad stuff at the firewall and since this is a new firewall I'll need some time to move over some rules. This is kind of a fourth line of defense, so it's not like we'll have no defenses, but you may see more.
- logins MAY be weird (like you will be forced to login each visit. Again, a complex thing that copies that cookie amoungst four or five webservers.

We are in no danger of losing data. We take a backup every night. That's how I first noticed the problem, the backups started taking much longer due to the bad HD.

Anyhow, if the site is down for a few hours go do some work or go outside and play.
 

mikeot

Member
SoSH Member
Dec 22, 2006
8,148
Maybe after game 4 of the NBA finals? Just a suggestion, Al.
 

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,855
Mtigawi
This should be complete - please report any new issues here. I *think* that I got most everything sorted out
 

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,855
Mtigawi
one thing to look out for is getting logged off automatically more than you used to. That was something that I had to mess with a ton on the last server and pretty sure it may happen again
 

AB in DC

OG Football Writing
SoSH Member
Jul 10, 2002
13,633
Springfield, VA
Thanks, Nip. I am afraid to ask just how much you had to lay out for all this hardware. It's a good reminder to people like me that a place like SoSH costs a lot of money to run, and it's on all of us to contribute toward the upkeep.