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Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Printable Version

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Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - FreelanceWizard - 08-11-2014

It's finally time to complete the move of the site over to AWS (this post talks about the how and why, if you hadn't heard). This will require a few hours of downtime so I can grab a consistent snapshot of the site database and uploaded files. My last snapshot was from the middle of July, so it's out of date, but that should reduce the duration of the downtime.

Currently, I'm planning to take the downtime this Saturday, around 4:00pm Central time (UTC-5). We don't get a lot of traffic on Saturdays, since people are actually playing the game then. Smile I expect the downtime to last about 4 hours, but it might go longer depending on how slow our current host is. Today, for instance, it's dragging really badly.

Please be prepared for weirdness and broken things even once the site comes back up over on AWS. While I've tested most of the common use cases (uploading files, reading and posting, etc.), any complex site move is likely to result in some "fun" -- especially when we're also jumping PHP versions and server platforms (from Apache to nginx with FastCGI). If something blows up for you, first, wait until I post saying that the move is complete and I'm ready for bug reports. Then, if the problem persists, just drop me a PM (assuming PMs aren't what's broken Smile ) with what you're doing and the exact error message that you got.

After everything is stable, I'll begin the process of upgrading our software and moving directories around to their final locations on the server. Once that's complete, I'll start fine-tuning performance, increasing PM storage, and playing with some new functionality, such as chat, that we've discussed in other threads.


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Sophia_Grave - 08-12-2014

Good luck with the move, and thank you! Heart


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - LiveVoltage - 08-13-2014

A quick question FreeWizard: Should we take precautions and back up our own content like our character wiki format and save it over to a random basic text document so that way our wiki's are safe in the event of an accident?


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - FreelanceWizard - 08-13-2014

I don't think that's necessary. All of the text in the wiki is stored in the MediaWiki database, of which I'm making two copies during the move: one for backup and one to put on the Amazon RDS database host. Amazon also snapshots our databases once a day with a 14 day retention. Also, as a best practice, I always take a backup snapshot before MediaWiki upgrades, just in case. Finally, I won't be closing the account with our current host until I've verified everything has come over with no issues. Our current host also has snapshots of our database (one per week with one month retention) and I have my initial copy from July, so even if something goes horrifically wrong, we have layers upon layers of backups. Smile


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - LiveVoltage - 08-13-2014

Thats ALOT of backups.   @_@

Right, but out of the sake of paranoia, what if those 15,16,however many backups fail. What then?    xD

I joke though. Thanks for saying something about that.   :P


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Tiergan - 08-13-2014

Thank you for all of the work! It's appreciated! Good luck with moving the site. Big Grin


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - FreelanceWizard - 08-16-2014

And we're back! Everything should be working properly and much faster, but if you encounter any weirdness that's new, please send me a PM with what you were trying to do and what unexpectedly happened instead.


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Askier - 08-16-2014

Yay! Thank you Wizard Big Grin


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Xydane - 08-16-2014

I was wondering why the site wouldn't load but I had a theory that the RPC was being worked on.

Good stuff though!


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - FreelanceWizard - 08-16-2014

Oh, while it's on my mind, I also implemented the following changes based on our expanded server capability:
  • The maximum PM box limit is now 600.
  • The maximum file size upload limit for the wiki is now 10Mb. For the site gallery, it's now 4Mb.



RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Jijinji - 08-16-2014

BLAZING fast! Great job on the move.


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - FreelanceWizard - 08-16-2014

Thanks for the kind words!

I'll just keep making posts here as I notice or change things.

When I moved the site over, I rebuilt the web server configuration from the ground up. Part of that resulted in our portal page (the thing with the Flash animation) unintentionally going away. Please vote on the poll here to decide whether I should put it back or not.


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Chika Ito - 08-16-2014

Thank you so much for this, and for everyone's hard work and yours as well!


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - C'kayah Polaali - 08-17-2014

Damn, this is so much faster now! Thank you so much for all your hard work!


RE: Moving to AWS: Downtime notice - Aya - 08-17-2014

It is super fast now!

I don't miss the splash screen, this way I don't find myself "misclicking" and ending up on a page different than the one I wanted to see (main page of the forums) ^_^

Thank you so much guys!!