OUT is on the move - maybe down for 2 days! <gulp>

snoboardrSun 15/05/11 13:33

Yes, after more than a decade in its present home in London, OUT is on the move to an undisclosed location in the north of England. From years of buying our own hardware and being responsible for the upgrades and ensuing drama that always occurs when it goes tits up, we're moving to a 'managed service' which means OUT will move to rented servers that are looked after by somebody else... securely of course! The lovely quickfind:jpc and moi will still be responsible for access to and administration of the magic boxes.

In theory we could stick the enormous database and all the photos on an external hard drive - except for the fact none of the London servers have USB built in because, well, they're servers and we didn't need it - and drive them up the motorway, but we're instead opting to do a good ole spring clean of everything and a good 'data audit'. This should make the database much more efficient too as lots of old data will be scrapped and everything re-organised and, well, just made lovely.

There are 250,000 photos or so to transfer too, as well as the enormous database, so once the current stuff is switched off for the move, it could be some time before the new one is active again. Last time we did this, back in 2000 or so, OUT was down for a whole month... but I'm aiming to be more efficient this time ;)

Memberships will obviously be extended to cover the downtime, which I'm hoping to limit to a single day at most.

Yes yes I know we could do live replication and have the two lots running in parallel off one database with a remote master/slave arrangement and blah de blah, but because we're going to take the very rare opportunity to rebuild the entire database from scratch, that's not going to happen. Much of the 'static' or 'historical' content will be moved to the new servers separately and early (such as the archive of all 8 millionish forum messages and anything that doesn't change much).

HUGEST of apologies in advance for this; I will post more shortly and a message will be going out to everyone at login, plus another on the home page so everyone knows.

Timescales are that it will happen before the end of May, but there is no specific date just yet - I will probably choose a Friday/Saturday as they are the lowest use days, though obviously that may conflict with Doctor Who topics, sorry!

Thanks for your patience during this - it really is the most major technical thing to happen to OUT in over a decade, and I have no doubt there will be teething issues while the new set-up is bedding in.

booshankSun 15/05/11 13:36

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Something about computers?

Ta by the way!

:)

snoboardrSun 15/05/11 13:41

quoting > "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Nor do I, but hey.

quoting > "Something about computers?"

Yep. And that OUT's going to be offline for a short while during the whizzy work and may have a few teething troubles once it moves home, but that I'm working on making it all more stable longer term. And, yeah, that.