Server updates

[Martijn Meerts]

First of all, let me just apologise for not being around much, real life things and work have kept me overly busy and I haven't had much energy left at the end of the day to do much other than rest and sleep 🙂

 

As Densha mention in a previous post, the social login features were removed. Other than the security concerns, the effort to keep it functional, and the relatively few people making use of the feature, another reason was the fact that the forum is currently not available on https. I did do some research, and with our current server setup, it would've been really difficult to implement auto-renewing free certificates. The only other option would've been a paid one, which would mean the cost of running the forum would increase beyond what we've been getting in donations.

 

In light of this, during the Christmas holidays I will start setting up a new server with improved hardware and the latest version of Amazon's Linux. This will allow us to set up auto-renewing SSL certificates using Let's Encrypt, so we'll be able to run the forum on https. I'll also be increasing the size of the hard drive so we have more space for storing images in the gallery and such.

 

I'm not exactly sure when the switch to the new server will happen, but there shouldn't be any major downtime. The database is located on a dedicated server, so that doesn't have to be copied, but I do need to copy all the uploaded files from the old server to the new server.

 

Once I know a date for the update, I'll post it in this thread.

 

[cteno4]

Great Martijn! Thanks for dealing with all this as it’s not the most fun stuff to snarl with.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[JR 500系]

Thanks Martijn for the heads up, and thank you for your continuous effort to make this forum alive for all of us! Kudos! 

 

*not that I am sure of all that IT technical jargon being the IT noob that I am but I am sure it is tough work*  🙂

[Martijn Meerts]

Hello again!

 

Took a bit to get going on this, as expected, holidays doesn't mean spare time when you have a house that needs fixing 🙂

 

Anyway, I've set up the forum to use Amazon's S3 storage for gallery images. While I'm typing this, the forum is moving everything over to S3. Theoretically this should mean some increased performance in uploading, downloading and viewing gallery images, and it'll also save us a bunch of hard drive space on the server itself. Cost wise, there's shouldn't be any major increase, as S3 is very affordable.

 

Once the gallery images are moved to S3, I'll also set up attachments to be uploaded to S3 instead of the local server. This means backing up the server will be much quicker, as I won't have to backup all the gallery images and file attachments.

 

Once the files are taken care of, I'll start working on setting up the new server itself.

 

[JR 500系]

Thank you Martijn once again for keeping us abreast and working so hard to keep this forum going! Grab a beer on me mate!  🙂

[Martijn Meerts]

So, has anyone noticed any issues recently? Since all the gallery images and all files attached to posts now use Amazon's S3 file storage rather than the local server 🙂

 

[cteno4]

All working well now. Only image delays are external files like imgur or Twitter Etc and we have no control of that!

 

thanks for doing all this Martijn!

 

jeff