After a lot of learning, work, re-learning and re-work, I’m finally happy with how the new server environment is running. As a result I’ve started to migrate existing services across to it. Here’s the current status. I’ll post announcements as significant things migrate across, mainly because there will need to be some outages to allow it all to happen, e.g. I can’t move the forum whilst messages are still being posted to it.
Here’s the current status along with the expected migration order:
1 - Gallery - Live on new server
2 - Wiki - Live on new server
3 - WxSim GFS data - Live on new server
4 - Forum - Still on ‘old’ server
I have some other things to migrate too, e.g. my personal weather web site, but I’m not going to post status updates for those because they really only affect me.
The wiki is now live on the new server. It looks like it’s lost some graphics over the past few years so I’ll have to fix that at some point. The gallery and wiki need reviewing anyway. They’re not really used these days but there’s a fair amount of content in them that seems a shame to throw away.
I’m starting the migration process for the forum but won’t be doing the migration today. I have to sync lots of files from the old server to the new one and the route I have to take means that it’s a slow job (for the first file copy at least). It’s possible that the sync process will slow the forum down a little bit so please don’t worry if it seems to be a bit more sluggish than normal.
Early warning about forum notification emails…
I’ve got a sequencing problem for the forum and email migration because 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 be delivered from the ‘old’ forum server. After I move the forum there will be a delay between the forum coming back online and the notification emails being delivered again. This will be the time when I adjust all the email settings for the new forum 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.
I’ll include this in the announcement of outage for the forum migration so you might see this twice!
Thanks,
Chris
WxSim GFS data has now migrated to the new servers. There was a short outage (approx 10 minutes) whilst I battled with a config file but everything is back up and running properly now. The config file problem was due to using similar hostnames for live and test…I couldn’t spot the slight difference that needed to be changed in the Apache web server config file #-o
In case you didn’t spot it, here’s the announcement about the forum migration - Forum Downtime - 4th April 2022