After the great 'server drive' fund raising by UMSF members, we have our dual 3ghz server up and running. I have another domain hosted on it already. It has been fast, and 100% stable ( touch wood ) for 2 months.

Thus, the intention is to move UMSF to the new server this weekend.

At approx 1200UT ( 1300 my time ) UMSF will be 'turned off'. The database is rather large, and can not be moved in an instant - nor can the 4Gb of attachments.

After the forum is switched off, a full backup will begin, sending the entire forum content to the new server ( this has been tested just now - and takes 2-3 hours )

Only once the full backup is successfully completed, will the DNS settings be changed, pointing the domain to the new server.

Once the backup is completed, the database must be repopulated on the new server, the attachments moved to the right place, the settings updated and checked - and only once the forum itself is up and running will it be turned 'on' again. At that point, it will take a couple of hours ( potentially significantly less ) for the domain-name shift to propagate across the web to your own ISP.

The move is scheduled for what is the quietest days of the week, and the quietest hours of that day for UMSF - to minimize withdrawal symptoms. Things might not go perfectly, so you'll just have to hold tight.

To keep everyone up to date - I will use a new external blog ( http://umsf.blogspot.com/ ) with news of the transfer - once UMSF is down, check there for details!

You want "quiet"? How lonely did I feel earlier today...???

Click to view attachment



Great news about the Big Switch. Thanks to everyone involved behind the scenes, and here's to a succesful transfer; in all seriousness I would hate to live in a world without UMSF.

Good luck Doug. Hello Stu . .

Give 'em hell, Doug, and thanks!

Perfect. I am also moving my home this weekend so I'm glad to see I won't miss anything as I try to reconnect and reconfigure at the new house.

Now, I'd like a few nods of sympathy from everyone. I am moving from a bustling suburban community to a rural agricultural area. So I won't have the cable TV company that I now use for my internet connection and will be forced to use the local phone company's DSL service......

The consolation is that I now have really dark skies at night, so I may dust off the telescopes and go back to that wonderful hobby again. I might even get myself something newer and state of the art to teach my kids with.

Have fun, Dan...(sorry; I know how bad moving sucks!)

Doug, not to scare you, but just for fun I Googled the word 'unmanned'....and UMSF was the fourth ranked hit! For both 'spaceflight' and 'space flight', UMSF was on the 4th page, which is still pretty damn good out of 9.6 million hits.

I've bookmarked the link to the "lifeboat", just in case. And while you are in this process and the forum is disabled, may I suggest (you will probably have already taken this into account) that a homepage at www.unmannedspaceflight.com saying "man at work" or something similar should still be available and it should include that same link on it.

Good luck during the switchover!

good luck!

There's a setting in Invision to turn a board on or off, and when you turn it off, you can put a message up - such as 'Men at Work', or ' Forum unavailable due to server transfer' etc

Not as scary as an EDL but good luck anyway!
I'll see you there and then.

You do know the countryside smells of poo? That's all there is. Livestock, and poo. I spent the best years of my youth in the countryside, most of it standing in, on, or near...poo.

The BEST years?! What the **** were you standing in, on, or near during the WORST years?!?!?

You do the countryside a disservice, sir. We also have the heady aromas of tractors spilling diesel oil... muddy sheep soaked with wee... muddy sheepdogs soaked with sheep wee... Argos chain-decorated chavs splashed with cheap Aldi "Rhino" or "Raptor" aftershave, and other olfactory delights...

Bet all you LA dwellers are reet jealous now, eh?

Speaking as a current LA dweller born & raised in Montana and therefore well-acquainted with the various olfactory byproducts of a number of animals...well, that's why I'm now an LA dweller! (Not that I smell all that good myself, you understand, nor does the city in some places...)

Gotta admit, though, well-aged & dried cow poo does have its applications. Makes a pretty good Frisbee, and of course it's always great to throw at your younger brother...

Believe it or not, though; I miss it. I miss wide-open spaces and few or no faces very badly; really miss the peace of fishing all alone on a big, big river. When I was growing up I was fascinated by the very concept of big cities; never saw one until I was maybe ten years old (Seattle), and it was exciting; thought they were the place to be. Now that I'm an old fart, honestly think that when I retire in 11 years or so will go back to Montana or perhaps southeast Alaska to feed my soul.

Well - http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/art...r_feature.shtml is a start. Have to work next to it - it's bloody 'orrible

Huh. There are 4 or 5 new condo towers going up right near me in downtown LA that look just like that! Not blue, but they have all that color-window-stuff going on. Must be the latest architectural fad.

This one's a few decades old. A really really REALLY badly done coat of blue paint is the developers idea of improving a building that should have been demolished years ago.

Ah, yes, developers...everybody's favorite people...

The new LA projects are basic concrete gray mostly--a couple are pale yellow in accordance with Southwest US architecture. The latter might have been a better choice.

Nah, the agriculture near me is vineyards, and they don't fertilize them with that any more. Did I mention the dark skies?

Dan, good luck on your house move. I will envy you for your dark skies
Toronto is almost as bad as LA.

Dough,
I am hoping, as all the rest, on a smooth transistion. Being in the in the IT business, I know that even the best laid plans
may not go as planned

Robin

Yes, good luck to you, Doug on the transfer. I have fingers and toes crossed that nothing will go wrong. I'm sure your by-now-vast experience with the Invision software will let you bring UMSF back online with no ill effects. (However, I'm already beginning the trembles, the first symptoms of the deliriens tremens that will pile on me full force in the tenth or eleventh hour without UMSF...)

And my heart goes out to you, Dan. I moved about 18 months ago, and while it was an urban move (from one city location to another), about 80% of it was accomplished over a period of six weeks, consisting of load upon load of boxes, transported a dozen miles in a truly tiny Subaru Justy. We had to have made more than a hundred runs before we ever even thought about renting the truck for the major furniture on Moving Day.

Sorry to hear that you're going to have to downgrade to DSL. It's better than dial-up, to be sure, but the speed you get is so dependent on your distance from the "central office" that it's truly a crapshoot whether or not you'll get tolerable service. I wouldn't recommend satellite internet yet, though -- last I heard, most of them still require you to upload via a dedicated dial-up telephone line, with only downloads available through the dish at broadband speeds.

As for rural areas being covered with poo -- in the U.S., that's sort of variable. Major livestock farming over here tends to be concentrated into blocks. You can have hundreds of square km with nothing but plant farming (corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum) anywhere in site. Some farms will maintain a small amount of livestock on a primarily agricultural farm, but that livestock doesn't amount to much in comparison to the cornfields. (Of course, a relatively modest-sized pig farm, no matter how small a percentage of its county it may take up, is still going to make a very strong impression on anyone who happens to be downwind of it on any given day. Trust me, I know. I grew up in central Illinois.)

So, while you can *always* find poo out in the country, here in the States you can usually avoid it pretty easily -- if you watch where you're walking.



-the other Doug

After firing "dig" at several nameservers it seems I've found the new box and it's working too

Well - the transfer is done. Currently, the DNS hasn't refreshed to my ISP yet - so I'm viewing via a proxy that uses a path that has got the new pointing right. I can't reliably test the site in full until I can navigate 'naively' but I think everything should just about be working.

Doug

Just add the new server's IP address to the local hostfile and things should work fine. That's how I got in here.

Testing adding an attachment. This is just a console log of me going through several levels of nameserver with dig to find the new server's IP address.

Click to view attachment

OK -- it's about ten minutes since I noted in the lifeboat blog that Comcast doesn't have the new IP associated in DNS yet, and here the forum popped up. So it's propogated out this far.

Looks good, Doug!

-the other Doug

Must be propogating out pretty fast -- control panel says there are currently 71 people on the forum, 10 members and 61 guests. That's a pretty normal number for a Saturday late morning, here (late afternoon over on the other side of the pond).

-the other Doug

Got it!
First attempt half an hour ago pointed me to the old site.
Er..., I suppose I'm posting at the new server, right?

All's well here too... good to be back!

Wow. I'm impressed how snappy it is now!

--Greg

Yup - if you can post, you're on the new site. The old one now has a closed message.

Response times for pretty much all functions are noticeably faster here, Doug.

This joint is jumpin'!

-the other Doug

Page process times show on the bottom of the admin section. On the old server, anything from 0.25 to 1.5s or more was common. Now it's in the 0.02s area. The performance restriction now is actually ping times to and from Europe for me If you're US, and especially west coast US - you're going to have a very fast server

Doug

Got it...and it's rippin'!!!! Well done, Doug.

EDIT: Just played around a bit, and you're right; it's just wicked fast from LA! What's weird is that I ran a tracert just for grins to the new IP, and everything after the 14th hop timed out; is this some sort of proxy thing?

EDIT2: It's unreal how responsive the site is now. EVERYTHING's fast.

It's probably a firewall issue/setting. To me it looks like ICMP traffic is getting dropped. Using traceroute in UDP mode it works fine.



If I switch to ICMP mode it fails however:



This may be done on purpose. I drop ICMP that comes from the outside world on my firewall as well.

That will be one of the steps taken by my server management guys who did a swathe of server security steps after the server was in our hands, I would imagine.

Doug

Whoah, you're not kidding, Doug! Super zippy here. Hooray! Who knew a server switch could happen without any major snafus? Our most recent hardware switch had us intermittently down for more than two weeks!

--Emily

Thinkin' we should call this a success...damn, this is fast!!!

Congratulations, Doug, as well as to all others involved; most impressive!

Just for testing purposes, a noted member & I just exchanged PMs...lightning, absolutely lightning, probably <1 minute delay. Wow!!!!

Certainly not me - I was expecting it to take all weekend

Doug

Sometimes probability doesn't suck, by definition...bask in the glory & relief!

Nice and fast!!

Wow, this is indeed MUCH faster. Thank you Doug!

I'm impressed. I thought my mediocre Internet connection would hide any speed improvement, but the site seems much faster now.

Amazing, but I'm concerned about one thing.
Does this mean we're going to have to think faster as well?

Well, after a full day of using the forum on the new server, I have to say it has remained significantly faster in all functions. None of the individual boards or topics are displaying that "take five minutes to load a post" behavior that had plagued about a third of the boards for me, and pages pop quite smartly.

I think we all agree this is a really good move, Doug!

-the other Doug

Second that as well; this is a quantum leap. Gonna need it for Phoenix, for sure, and especially because the landing occurs the evening before a US national holiday, so the traffic will be even more intense. UMSF has an inordinately large amount of Google hits already.

Speaking of which, Doug, any specific forum plans for landing day?

I'm not sure that what's important is that the board is exactly "faster", in some respects, though it is.

But, so far, it doesn't have short, extended, or long pauses, and it doesn't just "hang" as though the net connection between me and it had died.

It just loads at lightspeed for me no matter what. I'd swear I was on a LAN site instead of the Net. Dunno; maybe I live just a few blocks from the server?

I'm pretty sure the server is located quite far from my location here in Spain, and the change was significant.
What I always do after checking in is look for new posts and open each new thread of interest in a separate tab. Just a few clicks and I have a number of pages loading simultaneously on the browser. This process was taking a significant time on the previous server but now the time is almost irrelevant.

Significantly faster for me too, in South of France; which means about the same distance from the server as Edouardo

We've got an issue on the new server with registrations - the security CAPTCHA image isn't being generated. If you're trying to register, and can't - drop me an email ( djellison@mac.com ) and I'll do it the manual way. We're working the problem, hopefully we'll figure it out soon.

Doug