Major Software Update of Server

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DrSpooky
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Major Software Update of Server

Post by DrSpooky »

The Fan Forum and Wiki had been running older versions of the board and wiki software. This was because I got wedged when the server OS could not be upgraded because the disk would have to have been reformatted. I had been slowly preparing to do this by installing everything on another computer and dry running importing the databases, images, etc. and seeing how it went. About two weeks ago, we had an overnight power outage and the old hard drive finally died. The automated backups worked as hoped and the last one was only about 18 hours old. At this point, I think everything is recovered and usable.

The upgrade was a bit of a challenge because the forum and wiki versions were quite old at this point. The forum upgrade went fairly smoothly after I found a tool to clean the database which had suffered from multiple upgrades over the years. The forum is about 20 years old. But things look good now.

The wiki upgrade was also challenging due to the ancient version of the wiki software we had been using. I had to upgrade through an intermediate version and ask favors of a friend who works for their foundation. The core contributors to the wiki have been fantastic checking things and manually fixing things. Please speak up if you spot something that doesn't look right.

The upgrade comes with at least two nice side-benefits.

(1) Email notifications should work again.
(2) https is now working which never worked.

As a reminder, this is all a volunteer effort.
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