Server/Software Upgrades
Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:46 am
Sorry for the downtime today. One of the things on our list of items to handle over the holiday week was moving some infrastructure to a new server, so we've been hacking away it for the past couple of days.
Server
Our original linode server was running an ancient version of Debian that was getting very difficult to maintain or install new software. So, we wanted to get onto the latest version of Ubuntu Server (10.10) so that things were easier going forward. With that, we've also modified a few things in the infrastructure. We've moved from php-fcgi & apache2 to php-fpm (5.3.3) & nginx. This configuration gives us a decent performance boost, which we've been kind of needing lately. Web1 (our main website, wiki, forum server) has been pushed pretty hard lately, so this should buy us some time until we need to cluster all of our properties among multiple servers. While it's possible, it becomes a config and admin nightmare, and I'm not quite ready to tackle it yet.
Forum
This is probably the most significant change as far as our users are concerned. We've decided to move over to phpBB 3 instead of the SMF 1.x we've been using for years. The fact of the matter is that SMF seems like an almost dead project, and hasn't been doing anything to combat spam. 2.0 has been in development for years (sound familiar? *grin*) and 1.x has only been security releases. Because spam and fake accounts have become such a major problem for us, we needed to look at what forums will allow us to put more checks into place, and phpBB was doing that. Plus, they had mods to allow us to do all the things we did before with SMF, so we went with it.
That being said, there are a few issues.
1. Some attachements did not copy over. Some did. We're not sure why this was, but we didn't go crazy trying to figure it out. All new attachements should work, and it seems like a majority of the old ones did as well.
2. If you used a Gravatar for your forum avatar, you'll have to go into your User Preferences and enable it again. The converter didn't handle that (since it was a mod on both forums).
3. Karma didn't make it over. We're sorry about that.
4. We'll be working on a new theme in the next few days. Unfortunately, forum software doesn't make it easy to modify the theme AND use mods. Since we've already had a few mods installed, we didn't want to make it worse. We need to figure out the *right* way to do it, so we're going to take our time and roll it out cleanly.
5. There will most likely be permissions issues, etc.
Wiki
Mediawiki was updated to the latest release. There's a slight bug in the plugin that shows the languages across the top. You also can't login, since we need to fix the auth to point to phpBB now. I'll fix that over the next day or two. Otherwise, it was a fairly painless upgrade, even though it hadn't been upgraded in almost 4 years... (yikes!)
Themes Site
No real changes except that it was upgraded to the latest CMSMS release. Yes, it still needs some work. It's nothing we don't already know.
Main Site
We'll move the main site over tomorrow. There are few gotchas with it, including our ad serving platform, the pastebin, and the plugin to show the latest posts on the forum that all need to migrate as well. Plus, we want to make sure we don't break the module downloading piece at the same time. It's all doable, but it's already almost 9 pm on New Years Eve, so it was time to just cut a line and figure it the remaining issues afterwards.
--
If you find any other issues with these items, please let us know in this thread so we can try and fix them asap.
Happy New Year!
Server
Our original linode server was running an ancient version of Debian that was getting very difficult to maintain or install new software. So, we wanted to get onto the latest version of Ubuntu Server (10.10) so that things were easier going forward. With that, we've also modified a few things in the infrastructure. We've moved from php-fcgi & apache2 to php-fpm (5.3.3) & nginx. This configuration gives us a decent performance boost, which we've been kind of needing lately. Web1 (our main website, wiki, forum server) has been pushed pretty hard lately, so this should buy us some time until we need to cluster all of our properties among multiple servers. While it's possible, it becomes a config and admin nightmare, and I'm not quite ready to tackle it yet.
Forum
This is probably the most significant change as far as our users are concerned. We've decided to move over to phpBB 3 instead of the SMF 1.x we've been using for years. The fact of the matter is that SMF seems like an almost dead project, and hasn't been doing anything to combat spam. 2.0 has been in development for years (sound familiar? *grin*) and 1.x has only been security releases. Because spam and fake accounts have become such a major problem for us, we needed to look at what forums will allow us to put more checks into place, and phpBB was doing that. Plus, they had mods to allow us to do all the things we did before with SMF, so we went with it.
That being said, there are a few issues.
1. Some attachements did not copy over. Some did. We're not sure why this was, but we didn't go crazy trying to figure it out. All new attachements should work, and it seems like a majority of the old ones did as well.
2. If you used a Gravatar for your forum avatar, you'll have to go into your User Preferences and enable it again. The converter didn't handle that (since it was a mod on both forums).
3. Karma didn't make it over. We're sorry about that.
4. We'll be working on a new theme in the next few days. Unfortunately, forum software doesn't make it easy to modify the theme AND use mods. Since we've already had a few mods installed, we didn't want to make it worse. We need to figure out the *right* way to do it, so we're going to take our time and roll it out cleanly.
5. There will most likely be permissions issues, etc.
Wiki
Mediawiki was updated to the latest release. There's a slight bug in the plugin that shows the languages across the top. You also can't login, since we need to fix the auth to point to phpBB now. I'll fix that over the next day or two. Otherwise, it was a fairly painless upgrade, even though it hadn't been upgraded in almost 4 years... (yikes!)
Themes Site
No real changes except that it was upgraded to the latest CMSMS release. Yes, it still needs some work. It's nothing we don't already know.
Main Site
We'll move the main site over tomorrow. There are few gotchas with it, including our ad serving platform, the pastebin, and the plugin to show the latest posts on the forum that all need to migrate as well. Plus, we want to make sure we don't break the module downloading piece at the same time. It's all doable, but it's already almost 9 pm on New Years Eve, so it was time to just cut a line and figure it the remaining issues afterwards.
--
If you find any other issues with these items, please let us know in this thread so we can try and fix them asap.
Happy New Year!
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