I am intending moving the forum to the new servers tomorrow (April 4th 2022) starting at approximately 09:00 BST (08:00 UTC). The forum will be in maintenance mode whilst available, but at times will be completely inaccessible so you’ll probably get an error from Cloudflare during that time. After the move is complete you (hopefully) won’t notice anything different. The forum will still be accessible on the same URL with the same features.
There is one feature that will take a bit longer to migrate. I have a sequencing problem with setting up the email system that the forum uses to send emails, e.g. notifications about posts and PMs. I’m implementing a new mail server at the same time as moving the forum. The forum on the old server doesn’t have access to the new mail server and the security (SPF/DKIM/etc) for the mail domains has to point at the current setup to allow notification emails to continue to be delivered from the ‘old’ forum server until the migration occurs. So after I move the forum there will be a delay between the forum coming back online and the notification emails being delivered again. During this time I will be adjusting the email settings for the new forum server and the new mail server. If all goes well that should take about an hour, but if I have problems it may take longer. Notification emails might be buffered, or they might go down a deep, dark hole never to be seen again! I’ll try not to lose any, but please bear with me with the delay of getting things working again and if any emails get lost. The forum messages that triggered the notification won’t be lost, so worst case you can just log in and look for the ‘new’ message markers on posts and PMs.
I hope the whole migration will take less than 3 hours, so things should be back to normal by about 12:00 BST (11:00 UTC). If things are running on AND I’m able to display a message about problems then I’ll put something up to let you know how long it’s likely to take. If I have serious problems I’ll just switch back to the old server and then try to figure out what went wrong!
The first stage of the migration took rather longer than I’d hoped due to a battle with getting the correct user IP address delivered to the forum software. That’s now fixed after a secondary battle where I’d fixed the problem but some data was stuck in my cookies. Clearing the cookies got me back into the forum!
I’m going to enable access now, but please remember that emails for post and PM notifications won’t be delivered yet. I’ll be working on that as soon as I’ve had a comfort break and made a new cup of tea to replace my cold cup!
PS. To avoid problems with session cookies between the old and new servers I’ve had to reset the session cookie name. If you have problems logging in then clear the cookies for www.weather-watch.com and weather-watch.com from your browser.
Mail continues to frustrate me! It would be so much easier if there weren’t spammers making us all jump through hoops to send an email message.
I’ve not managed to get email notifications working yet and I’ve given up for the day. Unfortunately I need some support from the mail service provider and their support only works day hours. So hopefully I’ll get the info I need tomorrow morning and get it up and running soon afterwards. For the technical among you I need to know the magical combination of SPF, DKIM and DMARC to allow my server to send emails. Some test sites say that my settings are all OK, some say some aren’t OK. I tend to believe the “some aren’t OK” because I can only send messages to some addresses and not others.
The mail notifications (posts and PMs) started to work yesterday evening so you should be getting updates now. Unfortunately any notifications between Monday morning (4th April) and Tuesday evening (5th April) are lost.
There is also a slight difference in the FROM address for the messages. In the past they came from [email protected]. They now come from [email protected]. If you have the original address whitelisted in your spam filter you will need to change to the new address to receive notifications.
I still have more work to do with the server migrations but as far as I know all the changes which will impact you are now over. Thank you for bearing with me whilst I made the changes.
Chris