SimRacing.org.uk

The hosting agreement for the SimRacing.org.uk website expires at the beginning of February and I don't intend leaving us with Arvixe beyond that period. I'm therefore intending to move the site to a new host (which might end up being my servers at home ;) ) at the end of December. This is naturally cause some disruption and downtime; I'll endeavour to keep this down to a minimum, but also plan to move the forum software from SMF version 1 to version 2.1 (which is currently in beta, and will probably still be so when we move), which will cause additional disruption (might just as well get it all out of the way at once, eh?).

It would be a good idea to avoid scheduling events during these three days.

UPDATE: the migration itself has taken place. Known issues:

• Replay site not fully working and cannot be uploaded to.
• IP address blacklisting not working properly.
• Site is accessible via HTTPS but doesn't work properly.

Dave, I have a GTL Christmas special scheduled for the 30th. Should I cancel it?

Hopefully everything will be back up and running by then - or at least up enough for people to get the race details and take part. It might be a good idea to make sure anyone wanting to take part has saved a copy of the details (password, time) and downloaded any addons needed before the 27th, though, just in case. ;)

Ok, willco.

If anyone wants to test their connection to my server at home, please visit either or both of the following and report any space oddities, downtime, or poor performance:

• Gazebo (http://www.davegymer.org/) - actually hosted within the walls of Castle Gizmo
• Gallery (http://gallery.davegymer.org/) - not hosted here but connections now go through the two HAProxy instances which form the only ways across the moat

Thanks.

I'm assuming no reports mean good news - I can certainly see that plenty of people have been visiting my home site, thanks everyone.

One update to the plan - I'm not going to move us on to SMF 2.1 initially as there are still a few niggles to sort out.

Lol how long have you been putting it off?

Well I put off the move to SMF 2.0 knowing that 2.1 was coming, which turned out to be a good call because despite almost being ready to move to 2.0, 2.1 requires an almost total rewrite (again!) of the integration between SMF and the league code. ::) I'll probably delay the upgrade now until SMF 2.1 is official released.

DNS now switched to point at Castle Gizmo - it may take a few hours to fully propagate but all SimRacing.org.uk and UKGPL.com traffic will now be arriving here, although most of it will still be serviced by the Arvixe host for at least the next day.

Cooooey! Is this thing still on? ??? :laugh:

Dunno... :-\

it was this morning, but now it gives:
https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/warning.php

This login is from a different IP

I got the same screen 1st time I logged on yesterday but this morning it let me straight through.

TTFN
John.

+1

At the moment it thinks all logins are coming from my router's external IP as they're now being routed via a pair of HAProxy instances inside my home network. At some point I'll patch SMF to understand the extra headers HAProxy adds to identify the real IP address.

EDIT: I've temporarily turned mod httpBL off, so you shouldn't get this at all for now.
EDIT 2: Patched.

Server will be switched into maintenance mode at 13:45 UTC ready for the move. The forum should be back up (if unstable) a few hours after that.

The basic migration is done; the database and forum software are now running on a virtual machine under my stairs. :) Looks like all that planning has worked out well - done in under a millifortnight. ;D

I will update the first post in this topic (https://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=14090.0) with known issues - please report anything not listed there, either by posting it here or sending an email to webmaster[at]simracing[dot]org[dot]uk.

Grats Dave  :clap: :clap: :clap:

Seems very fast now  :thumbup2:

It should be, it's got almost a whole Athlon X6 to itself and lots of memory. Another good reason to escape shared hosting.

Massive thanks for your efforts Dave.

Sorry about the hour's downtime this morning - the Hyper-V host on which this server lives wanted to upgrade itself so I took the opportunity to also upgrade our server from CentOS 7.2 to 7.3. All seems to be running fine again now.