Notification of Site Maintenance

Having a problem with your site? Post in here, and we'll see what we can do to help!
User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:40 pm

All,

This is just a message to let you all know that I'll be doing some maintenance work on our servers over the weekend, upgrading the versions of PHP and MySQL that we're running. Both are pretty out of date now, and new products being launched (such as the latest version of phpBB for the forums, or the Nova Next Gen which should be launching some point later this year) just won't work with the versions that we are currently running at the moment.

By and large, most people shouldn't see too much of an impact from this. The server will need to be restarted, but any outage from that shouldn't last more than a minute or two. Most of the sites will carry on running as they had before on the upgraded versions with no changes needed.

The one site that I do expect us to have issues with initially is IFS. As we all know, IFS is a very old system (despite the new lick of paint we have given it recently), and so natively does not run on the newer versions of PHP. There are a number of patches out there for it that should repair any lost functionality, but as we have modified it pretty organically over the years, it is going to be a bit of a trial and error process getting those patches applied; seeing what needs to change and what doesn't. IFS is also quite difficult to get working on a local environment when it comes to some of its interactive features, which means that I can't do all of the work for the patching of it beforehand and just apply it to the site once the upgrade is through.

I imagine that the IFS site may be non-functional for between a few hours to a day after the upgrades have been put in place, depending on how much work is required. As such, I won't be starting this until at least Sunday or Monday, so that the monthly report window for COs is out of the way.

I'll be grabbing a backup of everything before I do the work, so if for whatever reason something does fail completely, I can roll back the change and revert everything until we figure out why the failure happened, if we get one.

I'll be sending out an email to COs hosted with us in a little while advising them of the contents of this post (incase they don't read it here first). I'll also be sending out an email to all COs and the PFA when I start and finish the work, so you know when you can and cannot do what in regards to the IFS and other connected sites.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Sun Apr 05, 2015 8:51 pm

OK folks, I've been extremely lucky today in that I've been able to get both IFS and the wiki working on a localhost server on my home network which is running on PHP 5.5 - I've even been able to get some administration features of IFS working that have been broken for the best part of the last three years, and I've created a new skin for the wiki (which I was also able to successfully upgrade to the latest version of the mediawiki software).

These changes are all set and ready to go for tomorrow, when I plan to do the actual upgrade. I don't know the exact time I will get to do it yet, but as promised, I'll be sending out an email to any COs hosted with us at least 30 minutes before I apply the upgrade and restart the servers.

The hope is that all of this should happen seamlessly (with the exception of the wiki changing its looks to match our other two core sites); however if you try to access anything hosted on pegasusfleet.net tomorrow and find that it isn't working, then check out this thread, where I'll be posting any updates as the day goes on. If for whatever reason the forums go down, I'll send a communication out through the CO's Yahoo!Group; so check with your CO in that case.

If you're having issues with anything on pegasusfleet.net and I haven't posted anything in here that might be related, then start a new thread in the website helpdesk forum.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 10:45 am

I have started the lengthy process of downloading a compressed backup of all of the site's files. Once that is done, I will be downloading a compressed copy of the server's MySQL databases.

I don't expect to need to restore from either, but if I do, any changes made between now and when the process is completed may need to be re-done.

Once the database backups have been downloaded, I will issue the 30-minute warning for the server restart.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 12:32 pm

Backups have been downloaded.

30 minutes until server reboot.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 1:49 pm

PHP upgrade went well - we're now running on PHP 5.5

MySQL is halfway through the upgrade process; we're currently sitting at version 5.5. I've just completed the database checks to make sure that upgrade went fine, and I'm about to complete the process for upgrading to 5.6 (it was a large jump so had to do the upgrade in two steps to make sure nothing broke). The server may need to do another rebuild once this upgrade is done, which for the PHP upgrade took about 20-30 minutes to complete.

Upgraded IFS site has been put in place and should now work without any issues. Upgraded wiki is currently in the process of being uploaded (existing wiki currently non-functional until work is complete).

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 1:57 pm

Upgrade to 5.6 went swimmingly, and no rebuild was necessary. I've checked the database and they're all showing as OK, but if you get any errors or strangeness going on with the stuff stored on the database, let me know and I can investigate.

Last task now is to complete the upgrade of the wiki.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 2:39 pm

Wiki files are uploaded. Running the update script for the wiki database now. It may take some time.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 3:02 pm

Wiki upgrade is done. I'm just in the process of updating all of the templates to match the new skin colour scheme.

User avatar
Williams
Admin
Admin
Posts: 824
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm
Location: England
Contact:

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Williams » Mon Apr 06, 2015 3:34 pm

And the wiki is done!

Any of the individual pages that had things like tables on them may need to be modified to fix the new skin. Of particular note are the character pages, which often have a table at the bottom under the Chronology section showing the character's rise through the ranks. In most cases, you can simply remove the bits that specify the colours, and the defaults should suffice (have a look at the Templates/Character page for an example). However if you want to have a definitely-set series of colours, here are the ones used on the templates:

Standard background (a shade darker than the overall body background): #bbb
Darker background (for example, a darker table header): #aaa
Lighter text colour (for use on the darker background sections): #333

Standard text is #444 and the overall body background is #dbdbdb


Any issues with any of the sites, let me know! Otherwise, the site upgrade work is done :)

Treymiar
Chief Petty Officer
Chief Petty Officer
Posts: 240
Joined: Sun Aug 04, 2013 2:15 am

Re: Notification of Site Maintenance

Post by Treymiar » Fri Apr 10, 2015 1:59 am

I've been experiencing major lag times at different sites which are member of the pegasusfleet.net domain. (It's not just these forums.) Sometimes it takes minutes for pages to open.

- PSF
Image

"Sometimes, people become enemies because they don't understand each other.
Other times, they become enemies because they do."

Post Reply

Return to “Website Helpdesk”