[admin (no pm's please)]

If this happens to your forum you will for a while see "trillian" or "trillian3" in the forum address. This will go away in time.

I'd like to apologise in advance for anticipated service disruption. The server you are being moved to is new and still needs some tuning for optimal performance. This will almost certainly mean a little downtime now and again.

[admin (no pm's please)]

We have had and fixed the first issue. Gallery functions were blocked by the firewall causing assorted problems.

[admin (no pm's please)]

350 forums transferred, but not a great number of very active ones yet.

The virtual machine they are going to is configured to be somewhat less powerful than Zaphod, the server they are on.

But overall the server can hold several such machines, the challenge will be in seeing how to split the resources to get the maximum out of things.

[DavidGarden]

hi admin I hope we arent going to be offline for our forum Dave.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Your forum is online and as it says it has been moved.

[DavidGarden]

hi admin how long will the message be display for

[admin (no pm's please)]

Read the message.

[chat]

If your too lazy it says 48 hours.

[DavidGarden]

no comment

[goanjock]

"If this is part of an upgrade then make sure the owner finalises it in the control panel and selects to redirect to this version of the forum, then once again the link will return to being the old one within 48 hours or so. NEVER BOOKMARK OR PUBLISH THIS LINK IT WILL NOT ALWAYS WORK."

Do I have to do anything I have looked in the control panel but can't see anywhere to select the re-direct

[admin (no pm's please)]

you don't need to do anything.

[goanjock]

Thanks

[chat]

Whoa mine is already done and it hasn't even been 12 hours!

[admin (no pm's please)]

A problem with arabic and other languages has been resolved. Trillian was forcing utf8 in browsers

[Sandman]

Hi Admin.
             Please excuse my lack of expertise in anything techy. I notice in your intro you say that only some forums are being migrated to the new server.

              I'm having a few questions from our members asking if we will be one of the forums moved. ( http://modelsteam.myfreeforum.org)

               The last thing I want to do is start an avalanche of similar questions when you're busy with the change over, so if this query seems a bit out of order I'll understand.

                Sandman.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Yes it will be, please people don't everyone ask. If your forums IP address ends if 178 or 180 you are moving.

[Sandman]

Thanks very much for your quick reply admin.

[EvanP]

Can i just ask, how can we tell what our forums IP address is? I'm only 12 years old, and don't understand this very well.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Start/Run/Cmd

The ping forumname.myfreeforum.org

using your own forum name and domain.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Just noted that based on the backup size from the new server about 10% of forums by "volume" have been transferred.

That has taken 3 days, but hopefully the pace is picking up.

I'd also remind people that whilst if there is an issue with speed, they should report it. But they should not automatically expect faster performance as in the first instance the server machine has been deliberately configured with less memory and cpu than Zaphod.

[DavidGarden]

Hi Admin, mine is Back to normal thanks aint even been 48hrs thanks Dave.

[gixter]

[admin (no pm's please)]

We need more than "has a problem".

[admin (no pm's please)]

File attach has now been fixed.

[gixter]

Sorry for the "has a problem" explanation of the fault. I will give better detail next time..

Thanks for your help with this...    

[admin (no pm's please)]

More than 2300 forums transferred so far. But you don't need to do much math as we have 35,000 forums to realize that this is just too low a figure to learn from. Yes to new server is running them well, but I'd be seriously scared if it wasn't  

Tomorrow some of the bigger forums will be going across.

[admin (no pm's please)]

One week in, 63% by backup size of forums have been transferred.

The process is a bit slower and more tricky than it has been in the past, as we are not transferring forums between servers on different racks in a datacenter, but they are crossing the pond to England.

Having worked the last seven days on this practically non stop, I'm planning to take a breather for Halloween and start again Monday.

[Lavathing9]

Is this an improved server, or the same?

[admin (no pm's please)]

There are a few threads discussing the new server.

[durangod]

http://forum.goldwingsingles.com

I know im not affected by this, my ip is not involved but i need to sign up another forum and plus a friend of mine wants one... we will sign up on the myfastforum.org...  should i wait on that till this move is done??

[admin (no pm's please)]

Not at all. The move is a mild glitch for a forum, here we are on the support forum which itself has just been moved!

[harry_lime]

Forum : http://rulesofpoker.trillian.myfastforum.org/index.php


Hi There

I've just been moved to the new forum address (see above). As i understand from reading the start of this thread, the official trillion URL will only appear for a short time.

I am also missing images that have been uploaded in the backstage admin (eg. rank images) although gallery pics uploaded by members are showing. Is this a problem or something i should just wait to be fixed ?

Thanks h

[admin (no pm's please)]

Nothing should be missing   Can you be precise about what ranks you are missing?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Actually I am seeing some missing rank images here as well.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Now showing again here, wonder if we have both just seen a glitch on the ranks server, noting to do with the move?

[harry_lime]

[harry_lime]

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think the problem is that the new server had a snapshot of the webpages which should have been deleted. The transfer of the forum hence lacked the permissions to overwrite with the latest files

I have grabbed the latest and put them in.

[harry_lime]

[admin (no pm's please)]

The transfer process is getting to the stage now where at least a little bit of performance data can be gleaned.

The transferred forums are working at a very good (IMHO) performance level, and about 60% of the load has been transferred, now the good news there is that the transferred forums are restricted to using less that 25% of the power of the server, implying we can fit 2.4x what was on Zaphod (and things were running well on Zaphod) before there should be any issues. Though of course that means setting up more virtual machines.

[Lavathing9]

Aprox. how much longer the trillian URL will be on?  Like days, weeks, etc.?

[admin (no pm's please)]

As the message says it should be 48 hours. But you may need to reboot.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Transfer of phpbb3 upgraded forums is now beginning. There are not that many of these on Zaphod.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Just 9 forums to go now, though shifting forums is only one leg of the journey.

[admin (no pm's please)]

All the forums are now transferred.

It strikes me that performance remains very good.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I continue to be very pleased with how things are going, we had a small issue last night which was easily explained and fixed, but by and large things are working fast and stably.

Choices must now be made, the ultimate aim is to clear down all "old" servers in turn so they can be given a new virtualised lease of life, the question is how to do it, do we use carry on transferring forums to the "trillian" server until we reach the point where it has work work for a living, or do we bring on "marvin" and ensure there are no performance issues at all?

Obviously we now have vast amounts of spare capacity to give people extremely good speeds, but to some degree that's the lazy approach and does not teach us how to get the best out of the hardware.

[EvanP]

Bring on the "marvin" !

[admin (no pm's please)]

Actually it is only sensible to keep putting forums onto Trillian until we identify the weakest link in the way Trillian is configured. Marvin can then be adjusted to either make that link stronger or to have less of the other resources and hence be more efficient.

As such forums from "ford" are being moved to trillian.

[EvanP]

Will my forum be affected?

[admin (no pm's please)]

The actual forum domains myfabforum.org  and myfineforum.org are now being migrated to ford from zaphod.

This will leave a few stray domains, but much more importantly the DNS system itself in need of migration.

During the DNS migration forum phpbb3 upgrades will have to be taken offline. Note This will not effect current phpbb3 forums it will just stop people making or finalising the upgrade until that migration is complete.

[admin (no pm's please)]

The DNS system will reside on Marvin, which in turn has now been cloned to sit in the wings as Eddie.

It looks like myfineforum and myfabforum have migrated successfully but they need some testing before full reactivation.

When the DNS is live I will probably start migrating forums from ford, some to Marvin and some to Trillian.

[Zudane]

Where do you come up with these names...?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Oh dear.

99% of the sentient population of this insignificant planet at the unfashionable end of the galactic spiral no the answer to that one  

[Nick(NR)]

[Lavathing9]

Is the change going to be done soon?  It seems like it has been awhile, and I am paying for the .com name that is not in use. =/

[admin (no pm's please)]

your domain was added by us to everydns.net back in the far mists of time. I have manually updated it. But really you should set nameservers to:

ns1.myff.org
ns2.myff.org
ns3.myff.org
ns4.myff.org

so changes occur automatically. As it is it may be 48 hours before the domain is resolving again.

[admin (no pm's please)]

The dns system is now largely moved. This is a nerve racking stage  

[admin (no pm's please)]

...

I really hate this bit, as part of this I am building a dns mirror on a virtual server. A mirror is a better means of disaster recovery. Currently though the DNS for the mirror has not propagated in part because the change in DNS of the primary nameserver itself has not propagated.

[Zudane]

so... you can't set the dns because the dns for the dns hasn't propagated?  O_o not confusing at all!  

[admin (no pm's please)]

Pretty much   Actually the new slave has now propagated, though the nameserver it relies on still has not totally got there.
But at least in the morning I should be able to make the slave a solid backup system.

It's amazing really the amount of this sort of stuff there is to deal with, people think a forums system is about this of that hack. In reality the behind the scenes stuff of backups, load distribution and keeping it all financially viable is incredibly time consuming.

[Zudane]

Well, running a forum isn't too hard on your own server... but once you get to running 10 forums it can be a challenge... 100 forums is enough to keep you busy.... running servers with thousands of forums... that's real work.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Well we have the dns mirror system working, including sanity checks so that it rejects mirroring the master system if the master system does not look okay.

Some TTLs on the DNS are still 12 hours from expiry. Which practically speaking should not effect anything, but I am going to take that as a signal to stop stirring the pot until things are totally settled.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Forums from ford are now being transferred to Trillian (and probably soon to Marvin).

This is not going to be a hurried process, there are shop systems on Ford that could really live without disruption in the run up to Christmas, and if we have to leave some stuff on the server then there is no rush at all to remove forums.

[Lavathing9]

[admin (no pm's please)]

I can't alter your nameservers.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Started transferring to Marvin as well, but we are seeing the odd firewall issue blocking transfers  

Anyone on Marvin should be seeing incredible performance

[admin (no pm's please)]

The DNS slave system does seem to be updating

Checking out things like that and doing all the transfers could easily take all the time there is

So I think starting around mid next week, there needs to be a split in priorities so I can get back to adding at least a few little bits on the features front.

[admin (no pm's please)]

One little point to note on Marvin is that as configured is has a lot less memory and cpu that Trillian. This is easily changed with a reboot, but is a good experiment. My feeling is that the memory at current load on Trillian is too high, but as we approach similar load on Marvin, Marvins memory will come up short.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Slowed down on this today, some few forums had a problem with the transfer to Marvin that got passed without being caught. They have been returned to Ford and some more tests built into the transfer procedure. But all the same a good reason to go a bit slower.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Remarkably there are still some accesses to Zaphod,  a week after transfers completed. Mostly it is robots. but there is still the odd browser access long after the normal 48 hours limit

Also some people who have not updated nameservers where that has to be done manually.

[carphunter]

with all this going on is this why i can not see my index page /web page on entry to the forum it takes me and my members straight to the forum
http://www.carphunters.myfastforum.org
http://www.carphunters.marvin.myfastforum.org ??????

any info would b great as new to this and can see your doing ur best and i have noticed marvin in the web address and was not sure if this was why i could not see it on sign in

many thanks neil

[admin (no pm's please)]

The www address redirects me:

http://carphunters.marvin.myfastforum.org/index.html

which looks right to me. www has always done such a redirect.

[carphunter]

ok but the www.carphunters.myfastforum.org link will not take u there do i need to tell the members that they need to change it to www.carphunters.marvin.myfastforum.org/index.html  to be able to see the main web page or am i thick and do i need to add the index html some where

[admin (no pm's please)]

[Zudane]

agreed, the redirect works correctly.  I even clicked the link you posted and brought me to the right place.

[carphunter]

sorry blonde moment things sorted now  
but thanks anyway

[admin (no pm's please)]

Forums moves are going to step up a gear again this week.

Zaphod has now been turned off to see if that rattles any cages. It will be turned on again for some final backups and then shipped to the UK.

The intention is to rebuild it and run it as a data backup server, games server and gallery server.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Zaphod is now officially on the move (well almost).

Trillian which suffered yesterday during a database backup continues to show as very busy, maybe we will need to give it more resources? time will tell.

Marvin is still only idling, but is being ramped up noticeably each day.

Ford is being slowly transferred, but does seem to have weathered the storm of having the gallery and forums offsite services landed back on it.

Slarti just keeps slogging on, ironic actually as 6 months ago it was the problem child of the servers.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I guess Marvin has now crossed the threshold to the point where it is working as a web server, but it is still absurdly under loaded, I hope to rectify that over the next few days.

Zaphod will hopefully be shipped soon.  

I'm slightly tempted to create another forum server (Eddie) that has yet another configuration, so as to learn more about the optimal settings. Partially I want to do this because the new Server has only a fraction of its resources utilised.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Zaphod is now in transit.

Some myfanforum's are now being transferred, though Marvin would still have to be described as only marginally loaded that load is creeping upwards, tomorrow may see Ford and Marvin on close to equal loads as the load on Ford is transferred.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Marvin is now showing more load than Ford, not surprising as Ford has only about 600 forums on it now, whereas Marvin has close to 9000! But those figures really are a gross distortion of reality as mainly little and inactive forums have gone to Marvin. Ford still has some big big boards on it and they are what really add to the load.

All the same from my point of view the workload should soon decrease, by the numbers 95% of the transfers from Ford have been done.