Planned Downtime

[Rachael]

Sometime within the next week, I'm going to shut down DRD Team for at least a few hours to attempt a distro change. The downtime can take anywhere between a few hours to a couple days.

Because this is going to completely reformulate the entire system (basically I'm rebuilding it from scratch and copying the files over), I have no idea what to expect or what could go wrong (usually a lot goes wrong in the process, just to give fair warning, I've very rarely had smooth experiences with this kind of thing).

I'm going to try and do this in a time frame where there usually isn't a heck of a lot of activity, but I can't make any promises for when it will be back up while I am doing this.

If anyone wishes to mirror the SVN site during its downtime, or at least the latest builds, I highly suggest you do so.

The site upgrade is complete and things are running once more. Please check comments for details.

[Enjay]

Thanks for the "heads up" and good luck with it. I hope it goes smoothly.

[Rachael]

Well the move was postponed but it will happen hopefully soon!

A lot of it had to do with the fact that I'm still hosting Skulltag's IRC network and services, but that's going to change within the next week or so. Once it's out of my hands it'll be a lot safer to do the move.

[Enjay]

Heh, I was just wondering if the move had happened. I was going to congratulate you on managing to do it without it even being noticed. Of course, I didn't notice it because you haven't done it yet.

[Rachael]

The moving process has begun - as fair warning any data you put up right now should be considered volatile - as the copying process occurs there is no guarantee that it will be available on the target host after the switch.

[Rachael]

The move was a success! (barely)

I would like to especially thank Blzut3 for his assistance, without which I probably would've given up early and said it wasn't worth it. Also there were other people here and there that helped me troubleshoot random problems that came up.

If you have any troubles accessing your old resources, please leave me a private message. The entire system was completely overhauled and very little has stayed the same under the hood, so it will not surprise me if there are problems.

[Enjay]

I don't know if I was just lucky with my timing of visits or what but I wasn't aware of any disruption at all and, so far, everything seems to be working for me (except the file loader of course).

Well done.

[Rachael]

I did a dual-server setup for the transfer. It's more costly and takes a little longer but the interruption to the end user is barely noticeable - it's also a lot easier to manage.

[Blue Shadow]

I don't know if this is related but when I visit DRD Team SVN Builds page, it doesn't load completly sometimes (just the page "background" and the google adds at the right top) and I have to refersh it until it does.

PS: If doesn't relate, then I apologize for posting in the wrong thread.

[Rachael]

It may relate as it seems sometimes the apache daemon seems to hiccup on some parts of the site. It will need a lot more investigation into the cause of it though before it can be fixed.

[Gez]

Are there bandwidth troubles? Sometimes the site just doesn't respond anymore. It times out and I have to try again a half-hour later or so. :/

[Rex Claussen]

I too had some problems accessing the site, but I was able to get back in within a few minutes.

[Enjay]

Yes, agreed, over the last week or so there have been a few times when I tried to come here and the site just timed out or at least never got to the point of loading. I did once check it with "down for everyone or just me" and they said it wasn't just me.

Also, sometimes when sending stuff to the forum (ie making a post or approving something etc) the response can be quite slow.

[Rachael]

There are some minor issues that I have yet to resolve with moving to the new host. It seems some search engine spiders have found some sweet spots on the site that make apache/php churn 100% CPU on all 4 cores and lock up. I have to go into the shell and manually restart apache in order to stop this. I don't know how or why it does this, but I've blocked them out of robots.txt for now, and hopefully that will fix it. I will have to wait until Blzut3 is back from vacation, however, to see if we can actually solve this problem.

For now, I put a very low max connection limit so that the rest of the host is still usable when this happens - this makes it easier for me to quickly go in and put a stop to this offending behavior, and the server is usually fine after that.

[Enjay]

A couple of points that may, or may not, be related to the move (well, one of them may be).

I received and e-mail pointing out that the DRD Front page link for Doomsday was out of date (obviously, nothing to do with the move) so I edited c-include.php to point to http://dengine.net/ instead of http://www.DoomsdayHQ.com. However, while I was poking around on the front page, I noticed the following:

The link for GZdoom still points to the page on DRD which merely serves as a link to Graf's own page where the GZdoom pages are now hosted. Is this intentional? I left it "as is" ATM because I wasn't sure what the intention was there.

The link for the Doom armory doesn't work:

Code: Select all

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database 

Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out where this should be fixed. All the other front page links worked.