Forum Upgrade/Downtime starting May 22nd

[Justin Kerbice]

@blizzy78: or the deal with NASA was in fact Squad will be paid with amazing pieces of hardware

You're lucky cause for me, I've never been told a new post was added except for one single time (my lucky day maybe) !

[Virtualgenius]

Why do you need 48 hours to do an upgrade don't you build parallel systems then migrate the content to them then redirect traffic to new system then decommission old

[Red Iron Crown]

I think 48 hours is a Scotty estimate, i.e. inflated a bit to allow for unexpected circumstances. If everything goes to plan I'd expect the downtime to be shorter.

[softweir]

First, Squad don't own their own forum servers, they use a hosting company. Second, this is a software update, not a hardware update. Third, it is technically possible but very difficult to migrate a forum database while it is live: the "old" system must be forced to stream old data to the new system while also streaming updates, and the new system has to make some sort of sense of the data streams. Given that a fair proportion of the data is in the form of indexes and links, this is a technical nightmare. It is very much easier and safer to shut down the old system, reformat data (as applicable) and then fire up the new system.

[Whirligig Girl]

Reddit.com/r/kerbalspaceprogram will be the community's repository for those two days.

[Virtualgenius]

I am not saying they do it live you would have some downtime outage, 48 hours is a long time for a migration, unless thats the period required to restore from backup which still seems excessive

[softweir]

They have been testing rigorously, so I assume they have a good idea how long this process will take. The time will include creating the backup (vBulletin strongly advise this is done while the forum is down because of the certainty of PHP timeouts which will create a broken backup), the installation of new scripts and add-ons, the actual upgrade process, and testing. I hope they have allowed a lot of time for dealing with problems they may encounter!

[pwlnw]

I hope they have allowed a lot of time for dealing with problems they may encounter!

Brace yourself ©. Vbulletin 5.1 is still under active development.

Our developers on the web in general somehow unlucky. People just want to communicate and not do beta test for vbulletin. Forum software is not need to be expensive.

Edited May 19, 2014 by pwlnw

[Bilfr3d]

I am not saying they do it live you would have some downtime outage, 48 hours is a long time for a migration, unless thats the period required to restore from backup which still seems excessive

You would be surprised by the time for backup... But you are right it is still a bit of time. I guess they have made the timeframe that big in case they DO run into problems, in which case it may take that long to recover. It probably is a bit of a long shot, so if its up before 48 hours, be grateful.

[Magion]

Short shutdown is OK unless it's planned for Tuesday or Wednesday, because nobody wants to miss Devnote Tuesday right?

Edited May 20, 2014 by Magion

[agises]

A static html copy of the forums for that 2 days would be cool.

[Red Iron Crown]

We need some sort of support group for the withdrawal symptoms. Is IRC still going to be live during the downtime?

[regex]

We need some sort of support group for the withdrawal symptoms. Is IRC still going to be live during the downtime?

Why wouldn't it be?

[Red Iron Crown]

Why wouldn't it be?

Dunno, maybe they run the IRC software on the same server as the forum software?

<--- Not an IRC expert.

[regex]

Totally different server run by totally different people.

[BFGfreak]

You guys are going to at least put up a under construction page in it's place during the downtime linking to some of the other sites like reddit and IRC right?

[Bilfr3d]

EVERYBODY!!! Copy the link to the IRC!!