Forum Migration

[AdeV]

Hi all,

After a bunch of work (mostly by AI  ), I think I'm basically ready to move the forum to a new server. This server is much more up-to-date, and also the way it's set up means that future migrations should be considerably less painful.

At this time, I plan to do the work sometime on Saturday or Sunday the 30-31st May. I'm hoping the downtime will be fairly minimal, less than an hour to do the actual migration. I'll put the forum into maintenance mode about 30 minutes before I start, so any posts that are being written at the time should post OK.

The other difference between the new server and this one, is it implements a "soft firewall" - so if your IP gets blocked by a rule, you'll be redirected to a page which will give you an opportunity to have someone unblock it. Thus I can add whitelist rules to hopefully fine tune the anti-spammer stuff.

Onward and upward!

[AdeV]

Good morning!

I intend to start the migration at around 9:30am BST (08:30 GMT/UTC), or in about half an hour as I write this.

The plan is as follows:
- Put the forum into maintenance mode at 9:30
- At 10:00 backup the database and attachements folder.
- Transfer everything to the new server.
- Update the DNS record.
- Open up the new server
- Fully lock down this one.

Based on testing, this should go pretty easily, and the DNS is on a 5 minute TTL, so you should all be seeing it by 10:30 or sooner.

[AdeV]

We are LIVE on the new server!

If you happen to notice any glitching, bits missing, etc., please let us know either in the forum, or via the contact form available from the menu at the top of the page.

Thanks for bearing with us, and (hopefully!) enjoy!

Cheers,
Ade.

[Jo]

Well done Ade

Jo