Site Shut Down

[Admin]

Hi All

 

Here at Recreational Flying we place a high value on communication to you all on anything that impacts the operations of this site.

 

This post is to advise that this Sunday (7th April 2013) at approximately 10:00am Melbourne Australia time, this site will close and will re-open some time later that day.

 

Our server is in desperate need of some maintenance including the upgrade of just about everything that is on it. The forum database has grown to over 800meg in size now and needs to be further optimised. The site's popularity, whilst is great, also places greater strains on the server so along with newer versions of software, the server needs to be tweaked further to accommodate a better user experience. So the plan at this stage is:

 

10:00am -Site closes, backups performed and stored on our spare emergency/backup hard disk with secondary backups downloaded to my own PC

 

12:00pm - Server is wiped clean and complete new Operating System installed

 

1:00pm - System applications, database engine etc installed and tweaked for increased performance

 

2:00pm - Site files and databases restored from backups

 

??? - site reopened

 

It is hoped that the restoring of the site from the backups should only take a couple of hours and to help ensure the site is down for the minimal amount of time I am paying (thanks to NatFly sales) for a highly qualified and experienced Server Administrator to perform the actual work...he is far superior in this type of work than I am.

 

Everyone here at Recreational Flying apologises for any inconvenience that this maintenance work causes you however it is much needed.

 

Thanks for your understanding.

 

 

[slartibartfast]

+1 for your use of "than".

 

Old dog, new trick.

 

 

[damkia]

2:01 pm Anxiety begins with incompatible OS and database

 

7:48 pm System administrator appears to have aged 10 years in one day, caffeine infusion by intravenous drip commences.

 

3:52 am Ambulance and police called to attend a disturbance from within a house by a psychotic individual screaming obscenities and verbally threatening to kill something/someone. On arrival a second person seen to be cowering in a foetal position in the corner of a room with parts of a server scattered all over the floor.

 

Two weeks later: Happy Valley treatment is going well....

 

________________________________________________________

 

Seriously, all the best with the upgrade

 

 

[mAgNeToDrOp]

2:01 pm Anxiety begins with incompatible OS and database7:48 pm System administrator appears to have aged 10 years in one day, caffeine infusion by intravenous drip commences.

3:52 am Ambulance and police called to attend a disturbance from within a house by a psychotic individual screaming obscenities and verbally threatening to kill something/someone. On arrival a second person seen to be cowering in a foetal position in the corner of a room with parts of a server scattered all over the floor.

It's times like these I question my career choice ...... maybe I can still get that shire job riding around on a mower listening to my ipod..... Good luck Ian :)

 

 

[eightyknots]

I just checked my calendar, it's not the 1st of April. That means this site shutdown is really going to occur!

 

 

[Admin]

A couple of things will not be up and running instantly upon the site coming back up:

 

1. The advanced search system we use here on Recreational Flying may take a day or so to come back up...in the mean time the site will use the standard search that most other forum sites use i.e. MySQL built in search

 

2. The Video/Audio/Text Chat Room will not be functional for maybe a week or so. When it does come back up it will be an updated version and configured so ALL sites on the server i.e. Aircraft Pilots, Clear Prop etc will all use the same chat room instance PLUS the "Users in chat" that is displayed in the right column box of the main forum page will be removed and the number of users "currently" in the chat rooms will be displayed in a red box next to the Chat Room link on the Forums sub menu bar so you can see it at all times wherever you are in the forums the number of people chatting in the chat rooms

 

This upgrade will also provide a better platform for the upcoming major site upgrade that has been getting developed over the last couple of months. However, currently development on the site upgrade has been temporarily suspended whilst a decision is made regarding some elements of the site's direction and integration.

 

 

[Doug Evans]

Keep up the good work thanks for the site :-)

 

My smiles don't work so this may sort it !

 

 

[old man emu]

Shite! It's the 5th of the month and I haven't transferred my advertising fee. I'll make a note to do it on Monday!

 

OME

 

 

[eightyknots]

Well, the site shutdown is going to happen very soon.

 

All the best Ian. I hope the number of glitches will be very few!

 

 

[dodo]

Best wishes. I know how it feels when you have thought it all through, but still you wonder what you may have missed.

 

I hope it goes well,

 

dodo

 

 

[Admin]

It has started...Aircraft Pilots is shut down, the Clear Prop Shop is shut down, everything else is shut down except for just this site and Jackaroo.com.au which is for email...so everything is done and prepared...perhaps today is a great day for a fly

 

 

[Guest Howard Hughes]

OK, I'm off to work, better have it back up by the time I get home.

 

No pressure!

 

 

[Admin]

OK, I'm off to work, better have it back up by the time I get home.No pressure!

Will do my best...although I will be out mowing the lawn etc

 

 

[Doug Evans]

Still not able to use smiles or do have any icon at the screen !

 

 

[Admin]

Still not able to use smiles or do have any icon at the screen !

Are you using an iPad or mobile device?

 

 

[Admin]

Finally, the site is back up...still some cleaning up to do but more later

 

 

[rankamateur]

Doesn't it make you feel good when you employ professionals to get the job done smoothly amd properly?

 

 

[Guest GraemeM]

2:01 pm Anxiety begins with incompatible OS and database7:48 pm System administrator appears to have aged 10 years in one day, caffeine infusion by intravenous drip commences.

3:52 am Ambulance and police called to attend a disturbance from within a house by a psychotic individual screaming obscenities and verbally threatening to kill something/someone. On arrival a second person seen to be cowering in a foetal position in the corner of a room with parts of a server scattered all over the floor.

 

Two weeks later: Happy Valley treatment is going well....

 

________________________________________________________

 

Seriously, all the best with the upgrade

So, how close to the above did everything get?

Graeme.

 

 

[Doug Evans]

Are you using an iPad or mobile device?

An iPad 2 ! It did work for a few days then it didn't. ...

 

 

[fly_tornado]

There was a notice on the site yesterday saying that the backup had failed and they where having to recover from on disk backups. So I reckon Ian must be feeling a bit 2nd hand after a day like that.

 

I worked out a while ago its much easier just to order a new VPS and transfer your sites across than upgrade a live server.

 

 

[Jabiru7252]

Forgive my ignorance, but can a site like this can be run from a home computer with a broadband connection (and permanent IP)? I remember a Linux site where a 486DX2/66 sat in a corner and ran 24/7. And several bulletin boards with dial-up connections used to hum away in the corner of a shop in the city. Or is it easier to just have it (the site) somewhere on the interent?

 

 

[fly_tornado]

no. the big thing in low cost hosting now is VPS. You can a lot of sites of a single machine, the server aren't tied to the hardware so its easy to move them from one machine to the other. All makes for low cost low hassle hosting.

 

 

[Admin]

no. the big thing in low cost hosting now is VPS. You can a lot of sites of a single machine, the server aren't tied to the hardware so its easy to move them from one machine to the other. All makes for low cost low hassle hosting.

We do not use VPS as we have outgrown VPS hosting...we use our own dedicated server i.e. the complete server, hard disks, ram, processors...everything, is completely ours and no resources are shared with anyone else.

 

 

[Admin]

Sorry, I am very testy at the moment...getting professionals to do a job they wiped our bloody backup disk and then they reload an older version operating system

 

On Saturday there was 11th hour discussions with the data centre about suspending the update and moving to a more powerful server using newer processors and new drive types of SSD (Solid State Drives) rather than the 4 15,000 rpm RAID10 disk setup plus 5th hard disk for backups that we use now. BUT their sales people said to come back Monday and let's talk...it was going to cost us an extra $25 a month. So with everything scheduled, money paid and resources booked I thought it better to stay with what we have now and chalk that up for another day.

 

The data centre was advised that the backups would be made starting at 10:00am our time and they would be backed up to our 5th backup/emergency disk so after the update, the sites could simply be copied back/restored from a hard disk that is physical in the server. Having had many years experience with IT people, I knew it would be prudent to also take a complete backup of all the data and download that (3gig worth for this site and another 2gig of data for other sites) to my own PC here at home as a form of "Disaster Recovery".

 

The normal backup regime I have is backups of everything on the server including the operating system and config files is done daily and stared on the 5th disk. Approximately once a month I do a disaster recovery backup and download that to my PC. This is then installed into a mock up web site on my PC to verify the backup before it is then transferred to a 1 terrabyte portable hard disk and stored in a safe place.

 

At 9:45am I closed the site and started my disaster recovery backup and down load. I contacted the server admin company that monitors the server being up every 5 minutes advising that the server will go down and not to intervene. I contacted the server admin guy who will be doing the software apps reload to confirm he is ready to go. I contacted the data centre to confirm they are also ready to go. Once my disaster recovery backups were completed I got the server admin guy to backup the server to the 5th disk...at 11:45 he replies that there was an issue and delay for 2hrs. I contacted the data centre to delay for 2hrs. The server admin guy came back at 11:55 saying all was good now. I advised the data centre to ignore the 2hr delay and proceed as normal at 12:00pm.

 

The data centre's pessimistic time frame was 2 hours (most likely time was 1hr) to reload the operating system and some apps. 3 hours had passed when the server was finally operating. Naturally when the server was dumped, my email stopped working however I had established a secondary email address and communicated that to everyone...but they never used it. When they advised me that the server was done, that was when all hell broke loose...this was their reply to my job ticket:

 

The reload has been completed and xxx has been installed. In the course of reload, all drives were unfortunately reinitialized so you will have to use your back up from your local home computer. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

 

WHAT...ALL DRIVES REINITIALISED...holly sh!t and they say "unfortunately"...this was a major mistake on their behalf and they knew that backups were on the 5 disk as I had communicated that to them when I said I had also taken a disaster recovery backup to my PC which they quoted in their reply.

 

This now meant that I had to manually upload the 3gig of this site's data (plus another 2gig which I haven't done yet for other sites like the shop etc). The upload speed from here to the server was lucky to get 75k/s. Plus the biggest issue is to import nearly 800meg of data into the database which due to database import file size limitations meant I couldn't just import the data into the database. I installed a program called MySQLDumper which takes a small number of records and "spits" it into the database and with over 1.5million records takes hours to do. After the first hour of uploading the backups it all collapsed because the server admin guy was still setting up all the other applications the server needs and optimising things so had to start again.

 

Finally by 2am the site was up and checked, email was restored and redirects from other domains were restored.

 

So much for bloody professionals...if I hadn't taken a disaster recovery backup the best you all would have ended up with was a nearly 1 month old backup...and we now have an older operating system than what we had before...there is going to be some mighty backlash for the data centre over this...anyone want to buy a website because I have had enough of doing this........................today

 

 

[fly_tornado]

These easiest way to dump mysql is across a network, once you have your new server up to date run mysql slave on it and let the old server run as master. when you are ready to go live just disconnect the old server.

 

Doing it by files blows big time.

 

I wouldn't use linux's journaling file system in raid, asking for trouble.

 

My advice: Take tuesday off!