7:58 PM Feb 24

The database and file structure are about 30% copied into a sandbox environment. I am going to let that finish overnight and do some more tomorrow afternoon. I might as well throw out a few goals so you guys can see what the plan is.

• • Create a sandbox - partially complete, when this is up it will be at sandbox.twcenter.net
  • Figure out what parts did not get written correctly and manually fix - could be quick, probably not
  • Remove the old front end and point the index to the Articles section. This was always the plan for Articles
  • Prune - Manually prune a ton of stuff. Users, old posts from stuff like the Mudpit, etc
  • Update the OS on the server. Its time for the latest Long Term Support version of Ubuntu
  • Update vBulletin. We are still using vBulletin 4, mostly because some of the numerous plugins we use were never updated for vBulletin 5, and the latest is now vBulletin 6. We may lose some plugins. We will have to survive without them.
  • Figure out Cloudflare. It's not playing nicely with our SSL from Let's Encrypt. MIght have to go with a different solution for that, but I definitely want Cloudflare back on the front end to help mitigate DDoS attacks in the future. On my personal business site it works fine. Irritating.
  • Fix the site email situation. There is some stuff on this I won't go into yet
  • Update the wiki software. This one should be pretty easy, so it will be last.

Make no mistake, this will be an extended down time. Mostly because since I have to do a bunch of stuff anyways I might as well take the time to do some things that have been needed for quite a while. Some of this is very time consuming.

One of the problems with vBulletin is that you cannot easily purge data. For instance I saw a comment about purging old users. I wish it was as simple as clicking a few buttons and purging those, but it isnt. There is a function to prune users but its clumsy as hell, very server intensive and takes forever to run. And it has to be run manually. Running mass operations on the database via php is ridiculously slow compare to doing it via command line on the server.

The same applies to pruning old posts, or forums, or anything else. I hve to write some custom scripts for this, and I HAVE to make sure I get it right before I deploy this.

The wiki will stay up for now.

wiki.twcenter.net

GrnEyedDvl