Moving to AWS: Downtime notice

[FreelanceWizard]

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 My last snapshot was from the middle of July, so it's out of date, but that should reduce the duration of the downtime.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. 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 ) 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.

[Sophia_Grave]

Good luck with the move, and thank you! :love:

[LiveVoltage]

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?

[FreelanceWizard]

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.

[LiveVoltage]

Thats ALOT of backups.   @_@

 

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

 

I joke though. Thanks for saying something about that.  

[Tiergan]

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

[FreelanceWizard]

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.

[Askier]

Yay! Thank you Wizard 

[Xydane Vale]

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

 

Good stuff though!

[FreelanceWizard]

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.
  

[Jijinji]

BLAZING fast! Great job on the move.

[FreelanceWizard]

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.

[Chika Ito]

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

[C'kayah Polaali]

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

[Aya]

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!!

[Erik Mynhier]

Well done my friend. Truly an internet wizard among us.

[Melkire]

"Brilliant!" #guinness :thumbsup:

[T'shina]

I got a message from someone earlier who didn't know how to get a hold of anyone who said that they tried to sign up but there was no verification image for them. Just a heads up.

[Chika Ito]

Yea a friend of mine was trying to apply earlier as well, and encountered the same issue.

[FreelanceWizard]

Yep, I can definitely replicate it. I'll turn on some debugging settings and dig into it tomorrow, then post here when it's all good again.

[FreelanceWizard]

Registration should now be fixed. I needed to install the GD2 library, since someone (*cough*MyBB*cough*) doesn't like to use ImageMagick. I'd completely forgotten that we had an actual image CAPTCHA turned on, since it really doesn't help much with spambots.

[Coatleque]

When logging into the Wiki section this morning, I had to log in -twice- before it registered I was actually logged in. As in, I entered my account and logged in but still couldn't edit the page. I had to go do it again before my account name appeared at the top of the page. All was right in the world after that.

*twitch* *twitch*

[Berrod Armstrong]

When logging into the Wiki section this morning, I had to log in -twice- before it registered I was actually logged in.  As in, I entered my account and logged in but still couldn't edit the page.  I had to go do it again before my account name appeared at the top of the page.  All was right in the world after that.

*twitch* *twitch*

Ohhh! That happened to me too! I thought it was just me being a derp.

[FreelanceWizard]

That's not a new issue, oddly enough. Back on our old host, it did that to me constantly, but it's something I'm going to look into now that I can capture debug logs. I think what's happening is that the authentication cookie isn't being set correctly.

[chaoticsleepy]

I've been having a slightly different issue with wiki editing actually. When I go to edit Xheja's wiki and try to switch the editor over to Rich Text Format, the editing box disappears. Trying to switch back to wiki editor after that doesn't work either, not until I refresh the page. Not sure if that's an issue with the migration or myself though since my computer has been acting a little funny lately and I can't check on my work computer. ;;