Server Move

[Ian]

At some point in the next week (between 5th-12th April), we'll be moving Electronics Point from the current server to a nice shiny new one .

It should be a little bit faster, but the main reason for the move is to make sure that we're able to keep current with PHP/MySQL releases that run the forum software.

The move should be relatively painless, with perhaps ~30 mins or so when I'll need to "freeze" the site so that no content is lost during the move. Once that is done, it will take some time for DNS servers to catch up with the new server location... however I will do my best to make sure that the old server can share the new database so this isn't a problem. I've done this in the past and it's always worked well, however this time we're changing quite a few technologies so it may take a little more work.

Once I know a little more about when the move will take place, I'll post more here. I'm going to try and wait for a quiet time when not many people are online and then pounce .

 

[shrtrnd]

Thanks for the info.
I didn't know you HAD any quiet-time on this site. Everybody's got lots of questions.

 

[Ian]

Well it's all relative . According to the stats the quietest time is around 5-6am... but thankfully 7am is still pretty quiet, so I don't have to get up too early .

 

[Ian]

I'm hoping to start the server move in the next hour or so - I'm just preparing things now . Once the database is about to be "locked", I'll place a notice on the site for the duration (I'm hoping no longer than 30 mins).

 

[Ian]

And we're done

Things may be a little slow until your ISP's DNS server updates, but that should be within 24h.

 

[shrtrnd]

Transistion was smooth as silk, at my end anyway.

 

[GreenGiant]

I was actually going to mention yesterday that the site was really slow, but then you had your last post, thanks for the updates Ian, another forum I was on never warned of anything, they just did it and then bitched when people complained about outages and slowness

 

[(*steve*)]

I didn't notice anything.

And I think that's the best outcome

 

[Ian]

Really pleased that this went unnoticed for the most part .

It looks like 99% of site visitors are using the new server now, so if anyone reading this is find the site slow, it may be worth flushing your DNS cache to see if you can jump to the new server that way.

 

[smitthhyy]

Was getting error from your server about 10 hours before this post. Message was:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator to inform of the time the error occurred and of anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Web Server at electronicspoint.com

Didn't matter what browser or machine or even network I tried from.

 

[Ian]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll take a look into this now. Did the error message last for a while?