I hate to give such a broad window but sometime today, Friday or Saturday I need to take the site down for about three hours.
The server we are on has a bad hard drive and need to move the data off to a new server. The issue is that since the server is so large that I'll only be able to move the database and core files. Since the hard drive is in a state of degradation it makes moving data slooooooooow, so even just the database will probably take an hour to transfer.
What this means is that it's going to a server without years of tweaks we've made to it. This might be good, this might be bad, but nothing we won't be able to fix reasonably quickly.
Some things that I think might not work 100%:
- avatars and uploaded images. There is a complex product behind the scenes handling this.
- spam. given our size we attract lots of spam. We stop 99.99% before it hits a thread. Historically I also block bad stuff at the firewall and since this is a new firewall I'll need some time to move over some rules. This is kind of a fourth line of defense, so it's not like we'll have no defenses, but you may see more.
- logins MAY be weird (like you will be forced to login each visit. Again, a complex thing that copies that cookie amoungst four or five webservers.
We are in no danger of losing data. We take a backup every night. That's how I first noticed the problem, the backups started taking much longer due to the bad HD.
Anyhow, if the site is down for a few hours go do some work or go outside and play.
The server we are on has a bad hard drive and need to move the data off to a new server. The issue is that since the server is so large that I'll only be able to move the database and core files. Since the hard drive is in a state of degradation it makes moving data slooooooooow, so even just the database will probably take an hour to transfer.
What this means is that it's going to a server without years of tweaks we've made to it. This might be good, this might be bad, but nothing we won't be able to fix reasonably quickly.
Some things that I think might not work 100%:
- avatars and uploaded images. There is a complex product behind the scenes handling this.
- spam. given our size we attract lots of spam. We stop 99.99% before it hits a thread. Historically I also block bad stuff at the firewall and since this is a new firewall I'll need some time to move over some rules. This is kind of a fourth line of defense, so it's not like we'll have no defenses, but you may see more.
- logins MAY be weird (like you will be forced to login each visit. Again, a complex thing that copies that cookie amoungst four or five webservers.
We are in no danger of losing data. We take a backup every night. That's how I first noticed the problem, the backups started taking much longer due to the bad HD.
Anyhow, if the site is down for a few hours go do some work or go outside and play.