The forum will be unavailable tomorrow morning (Sat 8th June) from approx 09:00 to 12:00.
This is to allow me to migrate it to its new ‘cloud server’ home. I’ve done a test migration of the major components which has gone very well, so now it’s time to do it for real. I don’t think it will take 3 hours to complete the migration but I’m leaving myself some extra time just in case I hit any problems.
As far as you are concerned:
The forum maybe accessible during these times but will probably be read-only. So you’d be able to see posts but not reply/send messages/do anything that updates data.
When the forum becomes available again it will be at exactly the same URL. I will post a message into the ‘active forum’ when I’ve finished my work. This will either be successful (new forum) or that I’ve failed and we’re still on the old server. In the latter case I’ll need to figure out what went wrong and then plan another outage.
You will probably need to login again when you access for the first time after the move.
There are a some unknowns/known things that won’t/may not work after the migration:
If you’re using a passkey/Google login to access the forum I don’t know if it will still work. I think it should do but have no way to test this until I complete the move. Well actually I could set up two new forums and waiting for Google to approve them and then test what happens, but the Google approval process takes about a week and life is too short. If it’s broken I’ll fix it! If these login methods fail then the good old password login mechanism will still work.
The mail receiver won’t be enabled, so if you send posts/replies in to the forum by email then it won’t work until I’ve got that functionality transferred. Again, there’s not an easy way to test this until the migration has been done which is why I’m not trying to complete it within this outage. I will get this working again ASAP.
There may be other post-migration issues. I’ll let you know of any I know of after the migration has finished. There may be some that I don’t know about but you discover. Please post in this thread if you find anything that’s not behaving the same way as it currently does.
Phase 1 of the migration is finished. The forum is now running on the new servers.
I can confirm that Passkey and Google logins work properly which is good news.
You can now use the forum as normal with two exceptions:
Emails are currently turned off so you won’t get any notifications at the moment. I expect to have emails turned back on within 30 minutes.
I still need to work on the mail receiver, so you won’t be able to send emails to the forum just yet. The migration was quick and without problems so I now have time to look at getting the receiver working.
Took a very long time to get logged in this morning…my browser just kinda hanged at the login box. Hit the page refresh and the forum popped up. Seems to be working okay aside from the login hiccup.
I believe that inbound emails (for those who use them) are working again. They’re difficult to test but at least two that meet all the requirements, e.g. correct email address and message length have got through and those that failed seemed to fail for a valid reason.
That’s interesting, I wondered why it took up so much space. . .
But I just hit reply to your notification e-mail in Outlook, so I wonder if it’s an Outlook artefact: like the empty attachments sometimes seen with Microsoft Exchange.
I’ll reply to your notification e-mail as well, when it arrives
As promised. . . but I have another clue: for both your e-mails I was warned that some content was on another server and asked if I wanted to download it?
For the first one I said no, for this one I said yes. . . but nothing seemed to happen.
Was there any mention of what other server? If it’s discourse.weather-watch.com then it’s possible that notifications only send a link to images rather than the image, which might be fairly big. Not all messages have images though so I’m not sure what it’s referring to in those cases.
Looking at the notification emails in more detail there’s an embedded HTML version of one of your messages attached which includes at least one emoji image from the forum. So that’s probably what was being referred to as the extra download.
