Good morning, or afternoon... Or evening. Whatever.

The board will be going down around 3 or 4 hours from the time of this post. I expect it to be down for around 6 hours (sorry!).

Here's what's happening:

I'm moving the board (just the board, not the rest of the site) to a dedicated virtual server.

The site, and therefore the board, currently runs on shared hosting run by a company called Hostony. Their hosting is all well and good for static sites and small communities, but it kinda sucks for a board as big as ours - Shared hosting is inherently slow.

We'll get a few things out of moving the board to a new server. The main thing is control. We'll have access to all the logs, all the settings and a whole bunch of other stuff we don't at the moment. It opens up possibilities for making the board faster and more reliable that we just plain don't have at the moment.

If anyone has any concerns, questions or anything like that - you have a good few hours

I hope shit gets messed up and I get all the admin powers and reset everyone's post count to zero and shit! HAHAHAHAHAHA

Just kiddin'. I don't even know if what I wrote can happen since I don't know about that kind of stuff...

Is there a risk some of the stuff you wrote about in the other thread happens (missing members, posts, data in general) and if that happens, what's gonna happen next?

Not with this, no.

I'm not actually updating the board software at this stage - which is what screwed things up before.

I'm not technically moving the board - I'm taking a copy of it to run on another server and then re-directing the address (racerxband.com/board or board.racerxband.com) to point at that copy. So even if everything goes wrong, the board will still exist on this server.

Part of the reason the board upgrade process screwed up before was because Hostony's database servers are pretty flaky. The upgrade process takes a long time; the database servers kept failing to respond every now and then, interrupting the upgrade process. There is a way to start the upgrade process somewhere in the middle, but it left gaps in the data.

Once everything is up an running on the new server, we can think about looking into upgrading the board software again. This time with much more reliable hardware.

Alright. I've saved up on coke and heroin. I'm ready for a 6 hour break down

Got it .

Oh well, might as well do as much browsing as I can right now.

lol

It's Carnaval (or Carnival) in Brazil, so I'll have to listen to awful music all day to get me through! lol

Noooo good thing I'll be busy. Don't you guys have dates for Valentine's?

Still the 13th here

Annnddd..... We're back.

Turns out I lied quite a lot about it taking up to 6 hours.

You may notice that the address has changed to racerx.edutom.co.uk. That's nothing to worry about - although it does mean that you'll have to log if you happened to be logged in when I moved everything over.

All of your links, bookmarks and everything will still work absolutely fine - you can thank Apache's mod_rewrite for that.

Let me know if you hit any problems

Most excellent! Great work, Tom

Wow.

You are most welcome, sir

What am I gonna do with all the coke and heroin now?

Write some very interesting posts.

LOL I saw the board go down; I thought it was down for a whopping two minutes. Just came back here and found out it had been down for over 4 hours. (!!)

This post is just to say a big THANK YOU to 'BOFH' Big Tom for moving the board to a dedicated server so seamlessly and quietly.

Now you won't have the problems that were on the shared hosting... including malware. Hopefully.

Thanks for being so good to this community, Tom... and so un-BOFH'ish. :)

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Actually - it was only down for ~13 minutes. I surprised even myself, to be honest.

Helps that I spent ~2 hours doing a dry-run before I took the board down, I guess

LMFAO I don't know if it's the lack of sleep but those two quotes in succession made me lol so hard

Sweet, I wake up and the downtime has already passed. That's a great way for me to start off a Saturday morning.

Thanks a bunch Big Tom! Your work here is VERY much appreciated!!

Thank you! When I actually do some I assume that is


Well, I'm all moved into my new house and things now - so I've got no excuse to not be about here more often!