Notification of Site Maintenance
Posted: 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 Both are pretty out of date now, and new products being launched (such as the latest version of phpBB for the forums, or the Nova Next Gen which should be launching some point later this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.
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.