About the down time last night (02-27-2019)
 

Apparently an update of one of the server's main software modules made my message board sites incompatible with the version of PHP running, knocking them offline. This filled up my mail server queue to where my ISP started rejecting emails thinking I was being spam attacked, even though I was deleting them as fast as I could while they were coming in. The server guys found the problem after about 4 hours or so, and indicated that putting a different operating system on the server should keep that from happening in the future. Of course this new OS costs additional per month, but I figure it might be worth not having to buy a couple bottles of Excedrin in the long haul. :hair_on_fire:

Not sure when it will be installed, but certainly the server will need to be offline during that time. And also not sure if this new OS will cause it's own problems with other modules or this older software I am running. I'll try to give a heads up if I can.

So beware. It's not like I just got fed up and pulled the plug, which I am sure likely was running through some people's minds.

I used to run a couple boards. When I see this one down I just go meh, It will be fixed. Upgrade, screw up, rinse repeat, lol

If it's any consolation I see that happen in my day job periodically. Fortunately Outlook let me create rules to send the ensuing 'OMG THE APP BROKE FIX ME' spam from the servers straight to the recycle bin.

Yes, I do that too, but the volume of error messages just chokes up the pipeline enough to quickly shut it down completely. I could do that at the server level, but then I wouldn't receive anything to alert me of a problem. I don't recall seeing any setting that would effectively do a "Only send one notice through, but kill the rest of them."

Had to postpone this for a bit, but it will likely take place within the next week. If things go well, the site shouldn't be down for more than an hour or so. But if things go bad, well, might take a couple of days rebuilding the server from the backups. And with any luck the backups will not be corrupted for one reason or another. :shrug01:

If I get a warning of when it will actually commence, I will try to give some warning and close down the site during the OS change.

OS updates are always a blast... Good luck, Rich!

Oh, this could turn out to be REAL fun. I'm going to a completely different OS, so lots of unknowns there. And the real fun part is if things go real bad, it's not just a matter of rolling back to the old OS. No siree bob, the server will have to have everything reloaded from scratch. :ack2:

That reminds me, I need to check with them to make certain that some of the tweaks we needed to do to PHP and MySQL are going to be retained with the new OS.

Wonder how much stuff is going to get broken with this?

They're not moving you to new servers with the new OS? That's what we would do. Then when we were certain the new ones were stable we would decommission the old ones.

Agreed... that always makes the most sense when working with production systems. It's what we do at work as well.

If you don't mind me asking, Rich, what OS's are we talking here?

Sent via the android pony express

The server I got from them was kind of a custom job, so quite likely they just don't have them sitting around at the data center. The server tech guys seem to be pretty competent, so I think they really aren't expecting any problems.

The new OS will be CloudLinux.