SETI.USA Forum and Free-DC downtime
From Skillz over on the TAAT discord:
Quote:
Sometime this week the database server will be taken offline. I am not sure how long this will take so I will explain.
I need to shut the database server down, pack it up and ship it to a datacenter. Once they get it, they will rack it in a rack and power it on, give it an ethernet connection and then tell me what the network info for that server will be.
I will then need to remotely connect to it via remote KVM, setup the network so it will be connected to the Internet and start up all the stats processing scripts.
In theory, it will take about a day. Overnight shipping, them setting it up as soon as they get it, I configure it shortly after and we're golden.
Realistically, it might take 2 or more days. I think its only going to take about a day and a half though, assuming everything goes smoothly.
During this time, the web site will work, but it will just be a page letting everyone know what is going on and stats will not be displaying.
Re: SETI.USA Forum and Free-DC downtime
Man, I had to jump through a lot of hoops just to post here! I can remove my permissions once this is all sorted out.
What's going on:
The free-dc.org website and all its related sites have been moved to a new server in a professional datacenter. This took me nearly 4 months of work — updating, fixing, configuring, and a whole lot of troubleshooting.
However, setiusa.us is still hosted on a server at my apartment, and I really need to change that. Hosting a website from a home internet connection isn't ideal for reliability or security reasons, so we need to move this site somewhere else as soon as possible.
The good news:
I'm happy to host setiusa.us on my datacenter server — the same one that now hosts free-dc.org, teamanandtech.org, boincgames.com, and several other sites. No problem there.
The bad news:
There's a compatibility issue. My server runs modern software (PHP 8.0, with PHP 7.4 as the oldest option). The forums here use a very old version of vBulletin that requires PHP 5, which my server doesn't support. It's like trying to play an old VHS tape on a Blu-ray player — they're just not compatible.
Your options:
- Upgrade vBulletin — Purchase a new license and update the forum software to a modern version that works with PHP 7.4 or higher. This keeps everything familiar but costs money.
- Switch to different forum software — Convert these forums to something like phpBB (which is free) or another modern platform, then migrate all the existing posts and users over. This takes some work but avoids licensing fees.
- Use vBulletin Cloud — vBulletin offers a hosted option where they run everything on their servers. This includes the upgrade and handles all the technical stuff for you, but it's a paid service.
Bottom line:
I genuinely want to help and have no problem hosting your site. The only obstacle is the outdated software — once that's resolved, I can move setiusa.us to the datacenter and get it off my home connection.
Re: SETI.USA Forum and Free-DC downtime
Oh there is one other option I didn't think of.
I can send the web site files and database dump for setiusa.us and someone can setup a server with an older version of php and mariadb (mysql) and apache that is compatible with what we have here now and host it yourself. This will probably be by far the cheapest option since I am sure most of you probably have hardware that can handle a web server/database setup for this site. For reference the site here is hosted on an Intel i5-2405S CPU w/ 8GB of memory and a 100GB drive. Though the database size is really small and the files are also really small a 20GB drive would probably be fine.
Apache version is 2.2.15
MySQL is version 5.5.32
PHP is version 5.4.45
