Just a quick update on the site situation.
On Thursday night we changed to two servers and also upgraded to vBulletin v4.
At first we were just (hah!) going to add a server, but it was best to upgrade at the same time since the new forum software version makes it easier to run multiple servers.
The server upgrade was a major one because instead of just adding another server clone, we needed to split to a database server and a web-facing server, partly to allow for future expansion.
On top of that we changed to the Nginx server app instead of the more common Apache, at the same time. So in total we had all these issues:
1. Add a server.
2. Split to DB and web servers.
3. Change to Nginx.
4. Upgrade to vB4.
5. Change to a new template as the old one (Kirsch) isn't compatible with vB4.
The result was a bit of a headache... One problem was that normally you can run upgrades on a test site (we've got two), and when the issues are resolved, do the main site - or even simply transfer everything across and then just update the database/s. But because of the range of changes being done, and particularly the multi-server issues, we couldn't do that. It all had to be done, mostly, live. Some late nights, up till 5am, there...
Fun huh.
Anyway it's all settled down now and the server loading - a big issue previously as we had yet again run out of server capacity - is back down at low levels. Phew.
There are a bunch of minor glitches to sort out but we've broken the back of it. The big thing for me is to get back our old ECF site 'look', as the default template we're running on isn't much to write home about. We'll have to get a new vB4 template and fix it to look like the old one - unless we come up with something better of course.
A big Thank You to Alex our server / vB tech for sorting all that out. Without him we'd still be back on a Sinclair ZX somewhere in Penge.
On Thursday night we changed to two servers and also upgraded to vBulletin v4.
At first we were just (hah!) going to add a server, but it was best to upgrade at the same time since the new forum software version makes it easier to run multiple servers.
The server upgrade was a major one because instead of just adding another server clone, we needed to split to a database server and a web-facing server, partly to allow for future expansion.
On top of that we changed to the Nginx server app instead of the more common Apache, at the same time. So in total we had all these issues:
1. Add a server.
2. Split to DB and web servers.
3. Change to Nginx.
4. Upgrade to vB4.
5. Change to a new template as the old one (Kirsch) isn't compatible with vB4.
The result was a bit of a headache... One problem was that normally you can run upgrades on a test site (we've got two), and when the issues are resolved, do the main site - or even simply transfer everything across and then just update the database/s. But because of the range of changes being done, and particularly the multi-server issues, we couldn't do that. It all had to be done, mostly, live. Some late nights, up till 5am, there...
Fun huh.
Anyway it's all settled down now and the server loading - a big issue previously as we had yet again run out of server capacity - is back down at low levels. Phew.
There are a bunch of minor glitches to sort out but we've broken the back of it. The big thing for me is to get back our old ECF site 'look', as the default template we're running on isn't much to write home about. We'll have to get a new vB4 template and fix it to look like the old one - unless we come up with something better of course.
A big Thank You to Alex our server / vB tech for sorting all that out. Without him we'd still be back on a Sinclair ZX somewhere in Penge.
