Forum server move.. in September.. Planned 11th September 2023. RESCHEDULED sometime this week.

[ChrisSilver]

A while ago I put up a topic or post about a possible server move and the reasons for this. In short we are moving away from self managed severs to cloud hosting, this is expected to be our last and final move, and will provide several benefits to the community including more forum features.

We hope to schedule this for sometime towards the beginning of September but will give at least 1 weeks notice when we know a move date. There will be some downtime during one day however this will be minimised as much as possible, and we will aim for the actual switch over to be as seamless as possible and to go LIVE as soon as possible with the bulk of the images and data being uploaded in the background whilst the new server is live. 

I will update in this topic as soon as have a switch date  

⚠️ Edit: Please see update in next post below

[ChrisSilver]

⚠️ 🚧 Planned Server Move 11th September 2023 🚧 ⚠️ 

Firstly, apologies with the relatively short notice of about  4-5 days, as my initial post above I was planning to give 7 or more days notice but I have been back and forth with multiple multiple emails over the last week with the new cloud host trying to get this sorted and a date booked in, as this needs to be sorted whilst I am currently in the UK the timeline for starting this was running out and this is the date that they have came back to me with within the time frame. 

There are a lot more details than we originally anticipated. 😅

After the move there will be some functionality and customisations that we will need to make adjustments on before they are up and running again, these include but are not limited to; the compare page, spot price bar, trading section of the forum, email notifications. 

As TSF will be offline on the 11th September 2023 (and hopefully only on this date) if we need to update the community to the progress any updates will be made on threads, please save this link for updates: https://threads.net/@thesilverforum 

Edited September 6 by ChrisSilver

[ChrisSilver]

The forum may need to go offline sometime on Sunday 10th September so that we can create a copy of the forum ready for the migration to take place on Monday 11th September.

So please be advised that TSF may also be inaccessible on the Sunday. I will try to update when/if I have further information as still waiting for some answers to questions.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this migration. It will be a beneficial move and is the last move we should ever need, so it’s just temporary downtime which should not need to happen again in the future. Thank you for your patience.

Updates: https://www.threads.net/@thesilverforum

 

 

[ChrisSilver]

At midnight tonight TSF will go into offline mode.

We hope to be back up and running sometime on the 11th after the migration if all goes smoothly, if there are delays we will update on threads.

https://www.threads.net/@thesilverforum

[ChrisSilver]

Ran into a few issues. 

So as to not keep the forum down for longer than is needed, I will keep it in online mode for the moment rather than going offline at midnight.  

I will update sometime tomorrow once I have heard back and have more of an understanding how to address the current issues we have bumped into.

[ChrisSilver]

Long story short, major issues in getting the files to the new cloud host. Mainly because they are extremely large. Zipping the original files also took over 24 hours, these then need to be split into several smaller zipped packets and sent, which also takes 12+ hours. This is after taking days and days to download the original files from the server in the first place 😅 there have been some issues trying to get this bit done even though we started work originally on Thursday. 

The forum is just really massive, and not easy to migrate as the cloud host is only able to take zipped files and not direct FTP access to download the files themselves. Thank you to Premium Members who choose to support TSF with Premium Membership as this does help greatly to our hosting and running costs. 

In order to minimise disruption and keep the forum online for as much as possible, we will only put the forum into offline mode and start migrating the database after we have managed to successful zipped/split/sent/extracted and migrated the majority of current files in the background. We want to make sure we can do this part first before putting the forum offline. 

The forum may therefore go offline sometime this week (possibly still very late tonight or more likely tomorrow) but we are unable to give an exact time frame as we are unsure and planning for a specific date/time is not so easy due to the variables. 

We do hope that we can complete the migration this week.  

Edited September 11 by ChrisSilver

[ChrisSilver]

So after more than 24 hours of trying to split the latest zipped folder and looking like it was about to complete with no issues, for some unknown reason it then failed. 😅

So back to the drawing board. Currently dividing the folders up in smaller portions and then zipping each of those, rather than trying to split the already created zipped folder. 

Probably realistically a day or two before ready to put the forum into offline mode. Apologies for the delays, glad though that we have managed to keep everything online and have not had any unnecessary downtime  

[ChrisSilver]

This migration will likely be sometime next week. Just uploading the files to the host still, via a method that is currently working. 😄

So once that is done should be pretty much good to go depending on the host. They don’t work over weekends so will likely be sometime early next week 🤞 

[ChrisSilver]

An update on this, the last several days have been a right nightmare and has taken much longer than expected to get the files over to the new host. That first part has finally done but they still need to download and convert the files to work with their cloud host and then upload to there, so that may take several more days.

The migration may not be able to happen until sometime next week. I was supposed to be on a flight tomorrow but have cancelled everything to try to get this all done smoothly.
 

As soon as I have an update from them and a rough idea as to when TSF will go offline I will update here, there may be very short notice at the time, it depends on the host. The actual time TSF will be offline for should be very minimal and less than a day. As most of the files are able to be moved across in the background, after the move there may also be some missing recent images etc that have been added since my initial upload, but those will be added to the new server behind the scenes without affecting downtime.

I will try to update as soon as I know when we are likely to go offline. My guess is sometime next week (as they don’t work on weekends) 

Thank you once again for your patience