Important Orbiter-Forum.com switching to a new cloud provider

[dbeachy1]

O-F Staff is pleased to announce that Orbiter-Forum.com and Orbit-Hangar.com will be switching to a new cloud provider, Digital Ocean, soon. The integration between Orbiter-Forum.com and Orbit-Hangar.com will remain and the forum software and database will remain the same. Xyon is heading up the changeover and is the main administrator managing the server, although all administrators have access and can help out. The main reasons for the switchover are:

• The ability for redundant, three-box failover. [This will happen sometime after the switchover and we're sure everything is working first. Initially the new forum will be running on a single server in New York, USA.]
• The ability to perform server-breaking updates without taking the site down.
• Better performance from the forum itself (theoretically shorter response times to requests)
• Geographically distributed servers with latency-based routing (which should provide a more even site experience worldwide; this will happen when we set up three-box failover)
• Multiple administrators with the capacity to fix things should they go wrong.
• Regular, simple server snapshotted backups with quick restoration capabilities.

A week ago Vash uploaded the VBulletin forum code along with a snapshot of the Orbiter-Forum database to the new cloud provider for testing purposes and Xyon has the new Orbiter-Forum instance up and running on the Digital Ocean server here. Please log in to the new site and try it out -- we want to give the new instance a proper beta-test before we do the changeover. You should be able to log in using your existing Orbiter-Forum account and password. Regarding Orbit-Hangar, Vash is still working on copying that over to the new cloud server and so there is no Orbit-Hangar test instance available yet.

There will be a separate announcement in red at the top of the forum for at least a few days before the switchover occurs. When the switchover happens, Orbiter-Forum and Orbit-Hangar will be offline for few hours while the changeover is made and the DNS records are updated to point to the new server. Vash will keep the old server on standby for a week or so after the changeover in case we need to switch back for some reason.

Note: please report any issues you have in this thread on Orbiter-Forum.com and not in the new forum on Digital Ocean: the O-F database on the new server will be replaced when we do the changeover and so any posts or changes you make in the new forum will be lost when that occurs.

Thanks for your help testing! :tiphat:

 

[N_Molson]

I just hope we won't have an Orbiter Forum Shutdown :shifty:

 

[Lucy]

I just hope we won't have an Orbiter Forum Shutdown :shifty:

It's going to be necessary to close the forums here before we take the final updates across to the new server.

While the transfer, installation and tests are performed, the forums will need to be offline as it's not clear what would happen to any posts made during this period.

We will give out plenty of notice before the switch occurs - the date depends somewhat on the testing we're doing now.

 

[dgatsoulis]

I tested a preview of a new post with LaTex, Insert Image, YT video link, link to a website with insert link, code tags for posting a scenario and quote tags.
Also the multiquote button.

The only thing that didn't work was the [math] tags (LaTex)

[math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma [/math]

produced:

[LaTeX Error: One or more directories do not exist]

It works ok here: [math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma[/math]

 

[asbjos]

Does this mean that we from now on don't need to wait 15 seconds between each search on the forum?

 

[IronRain]

Thanks for the update and good luck guys!

 

[garyw]

Does this mean that we from now on don't need to wait 15 seconds between each search on the forum?

That's not a speed issue but a limitation placed on the forum to prevent someone attacking the site by hitting it with repeated search requests. I don't see why, with the new host, that couldn't be modified but I'll leave that to the web experts to discuss.

 

[Lucy]

I tested a preview of a new post with LaTex, Insert Image, YT video link, link to a website with insert link, code tags for posting a scenario and quote tags.
Also the multiquote button.

The only thing that didn't work was the [math] tags (LaTex)

[math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma [/math]

produced:

It works ok here: [math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma[/math]

Yeah, I spotted that one too - thanks for the comprehensive test! I think I know how I broke that...

 

[Enjo]

What's the difference in costs?

 

[Izack]

All themes seem to be working correctly. Blogs seem to work as intended, too (media does not embed while previewing on either site.)

 

[Artlav]

Nice.

Can anyone give me an elevator pitch on what is "Cloud provider", and how is it different from "Hosting"?

 

[dbeachy1]

What's the difference in costs?

It should be a little bit cheaper even with three load-balanced instances. Once the move is complete and load balancing is done we will decide how to adjust the monthly donation target if necessary.

EDIT:

Nice.

Can anyone give me an elevator pitch on what is "Cloud provider", and how is it different from "Hosting"?

Nowadays the terms are synonymous, although "Cloud Provider" is a newer term and implies (to me, at least) a server farm running VMs, whereas "Hosting" could be anything from a traditional server farm (no VMs) to a cloud provider (all VMs).

 

[Lucy]

I tested a preview of a new post with LaTex, Insert Image, YT video link, link to a website with insert link, code tags for posting a scenario and quote tags.
Also the multiquote button.

The only thing that didn't work was the [math] tags (LaTex)

[math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma [/math]

produced:

It works ok here: [math] \alpha + \beta = \gamma[/math]

Fixed.

 

[garyw]

Nowadays the terms are synonymous, although "Cloud Provider" is a newer term and implies (to me, at least) a server farm running VMs, whereas "Hosting" could be anything from a traditional server farm (no VMs) to a cloud provider (all VMs).

It depends on how technical you want to get.

hosting = you get a server (or a vm) with set disk space and bandwidth.

Cloud = you get compute and storage resources and you use as much as you need and pay for that usage.

These days, as dbeachy1 says the two terms are fairly interchangeable with cloud being a very fancy word for hosting. Any sensible hosting facility would actually use a public cloud style setup.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Well, as long as it doesn't wind up like this:

We'll be okay.

 

[Pablo49]

Where is Ghostrider saying we are doomed?

 

[Lucy]

OK, firstly, thank you to everyone who tested the new server out. I'm seeing lots of "Wow it's fast" comments, which is great, and we've tracked down and fixed one problem I didn't know about before we started, which is even better.

What we're primarily interested in now is how the board performs with a lot of traffic bouncing around on it - or how fast it is when 50 users are pulling content from it. While that might be hard to orchestrate, it'll give us some clear indications of the load we're expecting to see when we move, and how the virtual machine responds to spikes in traffic.

 

[kuddel]

Glitch

Hi there,

is it a glitch or could it be that the 'new' forum did not get all attachment files from the 'old'/'original' site?
See attachment.

Apart from that, it looks good! O.K. it was a shallow test

/Kuddel

 

[orb]

is it a glitch or could it be that the 'new' forum did not get all attachment files from the 'old'/'original' site?

Attachments are there. It's probably something with paths to them being wrong.

 

[kuddel]

Attachments are there. It's probably something with paths to them being wrong.

Probably! When I watch 'my Attachments' all of them return that same 1x1 pixel gif, too.
So attachment.php might have problems in getting the path right.
/Kuddel