Printable Version of Topic

Click here to view this topic in its original format

Mosaic Musings...interactive poetry reviews _ General Site Information -> Scribe's Stylus _ Planned Site Outage, Monday Jan 16, 2012

Posted by: Imhotep Jan 11 12, 08:21

Greetings all!

It's time for a major sitework event. It's time for the annual major OS upgrade and security patch roundup. Unfortunately, the new OS needs the hard drives set up in a slightly different way, so I need to take the server offline, save an image of the system as a backup (just incase! always have backups!), and put everything back in place with the new configuration before I can start the OS upgrade and patches. Not really all that technically challenging, just a time consuming process.

So starting around 7A EST (12P GMT) on Monday the 16th I'm going to begin. I hopefully will be done in less than 8 hours total, so I'm going to say that things should be back in place and running as of 3P (8P EST). During this window there will be extended periods of time where http://www.mosaicmusings.net and forums.mosaicmusings.net will return the white "Page cannot be displayed" message.

Still doing some testing of the process on another system, if I can't get it totally nailed down I'll cancel this window and set up another one when I'm sure of the right way to proceed.

I'll update the thread when I'm done.

Sorry for any inconvenience,
I

Posted by: Cleo_Serapis Jan 15 12, 11:33

Good luck Peter!

Posted by: Imhotep Jan 16 12, 12:10

Greetings All,

Thought I would need some luck this morning! Best laid plans... Anyway, some quick thinking and help from Mr. Google sorted out what should have worked the way I was doing it, but I digress :)

OK, phase 1 is done - I took the data from the hard drives, erased and reconfigured them, put the data back and everything appears to be there. Now on to phase 2 - it's going to be a couple of hours while the system downloads all the needed patches and updates before I have to take things offline again to apply them, so I've put the site back online until then.

Type to y'all in a while!

I

Posted by: Imhotep Jan 16 12, 21:25

Hey all.

Well after a couple of crashes from corrupted downloads (another lesson learned, use a DVD instead of trusting the program to download appropriate updates) I have things running on the new software. I'm not fully happy with things the way they are, but I can work from here.

I'm not fully done but I don't think I'll need to roll back the changes from here. At a minimum I can just backup the forum database and redo the drives. The longest part of the process was the backup this morning. Anyway, let's see.

If you see anything strange let me know via PM.

Thanks,
I

Posted by: Eisa Jan 16 12, 22:52

Thanks for keeping us informed, Peter. We really appreciate all you do to keep things running smoothly.
Snow

Posted by: Cleo_Serapis Jan 17 12, 11:51

Posted by: Imhotep Jan 18 12, 06:35

Heyo all!

OK, I've finished cleaning up the mess. Live and learn for next time! Anyway, upside is that we're back to software versions that are still supported and recieve security patches and all that good stuff. I like staying ahead of the curve on hackers and forum spammers as much as I can between firewalls and software that patches ways they can try and wendle their way in..

So, please IM me if you see anything strange, but we should be good to go from here! Well, at least for the next 6 months

Take care!
P

Posted by: Cleo_Serapis Jan 22 12, 14:39

Thanka again Peter!