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- Joined
- Jan 8, 2009
This is to let people know where things stand with regards to the server and services.
Things were a lot worse on my end than they may have seemed. One of the backup servers also failed, in a pretty spectacular fashion. Accordingly, I am looking into alternate means to mitigate this.
For myself, I set aside my paying work for this. I am fortunate I could tell my clients to wait a week. Still, now that critical things are functioning, I need to get back to keeping roof over my head for a few days before I get back to site work.
All remaining hard drives claim to have a clean bill of health. The new disk's numbers are stable, I need to get the vendor-specific tools to analyze it properly on Linux (new drive is a Crucial brand). Still I intend to swap the old drives out with bigger models, as we are running out of space on the main database drive. The database is about 320GB at this point and some operations are no longer possible on the larger tables.
Replacing drives will necessitate bringing the server down briefly again. Before that, however, I want a more robust remote backup solution in place first. Our current situation isn't exactly working.
I am currently looking at pCloud and Backblaze. I may go with both. If someone has a recommendation that has a native Linux client, and can support any file size, I am ears.
This won't fully replace my own remote backups. It will let me store a much larger set of them.
I'm still trying to decide what to do about the failed backup server. It doesn't do a whole lot in its current state. Replacing it with another live backup is more expensive in our current situation.
A cheaper option for a local backup would be to setup a local drive as a 'virtual slave', holding copies of the server's core configuration and data files, minus networking. That would have made recovery much faster. It's never a likely situation that something that destroys the server physically isn't going to take out the entire rack anyway.
As much of a mess as SMF's code is, on review, I think I'm going to stick with SMF for Elliquiy over Xenforo.
There are a few reasons for this.
The main one is the fact I can actually fix the editor and we are a writing forum. Whatever your complaints about the new WYSIWYG editor here, it has fewer bugs than the one Xenforo comes packaged with, and I am not at the mercy of the devs when applying fixes for bugs that the upstream fixed months ago.
The second one is sheer efficiency. Xenforo puts orders of magnitudes more load on the CPU than my tuned copy of SMF does.
A third one is the Wiki/chat integrations are pretty stable, and I would have to rewrite them completely for Xenforo.
The code remains an utter mess, and I may look into some other open-source solution in time. I was hoping to bring us to Elkarte for awhile, but there is no real critical mass for development there, sadly.
One casualty of the upgrade has been what data integration remaining I had with Google, tracking site usage. I am no longer very interested.
Accordingly, my sites and servers no longer send anything to external services outside of user signup. On both forums, this goes to two services:
The first is to Stop Forum Spam. The reason is in the name.
The second is to Google's Recaptcha service. This is for the same reason.
This doesn't mean outside requests aren't possible. People tend to hotlink images for their posts fucking everywhere. This poses its own security and usability flaws, so I am considering forcing a whitelist of acceptable image/media hosts. I have a question thread here on BMR and here on Elliquiy. This doesn't need to be immediately exhaustive, but it should be large enough that questions about people wondering why their images aren't showing up shouldn't be too frequent.
Mainly for Elliquiy, but it is true BMR's forums could use some pruning and/or archiving. Fewer forums makes for a more active forum overall, generally.
I'll be going over this with the staff of each site, but if someone wants to put together suggestions, they are welcome to do so (in the Help/Questions/Suggestions forum on E/BMR).
My main goal for BMR is to get a good icon to enable PWA (Progressive Web App) functionality. It's been a bit of a back and forth with submissions, I should prolly just pick one.
Unfortunately as I mentioned above there is not much I can do about the editor bugs until Xenforo the company actually releases a patch.
A patch they could have pushed any time in the past four months.
Things that are done:
- The Wiki is running properly
- Search is back and on the daemon. I've rewritten the relevance algorithm significantly, and should hopefully function a lot better for people. I've also got it matching more European characters, though everything is currently transliterated into the standard English alphabet with a few extras (thorn/eth and ae/oe ligatures).
- Almost all old BBCode is working. Some old floats were not properly converted, and there seems to be an issue with padding.
List of stuff I want to get working before the new layout:
- Make Bookmarks into a proper extension
- Upgrade the Wiki to 1.35 (1.39 will need longer term fixing)
- Fix some performance issues with the site.
- Some special security stuffs.
- Do a mass fix for currently unspecified genders. (Got a backup of the old table in...)
- Fix the Ajax Chat and Ellibridge to Discord (Necessary for the new layout)
- Fix for profile custom text (make into addon) - easiest to do before making the new layout rather than after.
Once these are all set I can get to the new layout, people can start submitting custom css as before. This will be back to the old three-column design, though probably with fewer boards, among other familiar things.
Things were a lot worse on my end than they may have seemed. One of the backup servers also failed, in a pretty spectacular fashion. Accordingly, I am looking into alternate means to mitigate this.
For myself, I set aside my paying work for this. I am fortunate I could tell my clients to wait a week. Still, now that critical things are functioning, I need to get back to keeping roof over my head for a few days before I get back to site work.
Hardware
All remaining hard drives claim to have a clean bill of health. The new disk's numbers are stable, I need to get the vendor-specific tools to analyze it properly on Linux (new drive is a Crucial brand). Still I intend to swap the old drives out with bigger models, as we are running out of space on the main database drive. The database is about 320GB at this point and some operations are no longer possible on the larger tables.
Replacing drives will necessitate bringing the server down briefly again. Before that, however, I want a more robust remote backup solution in place first. Our current situation isn't exactly working.
I am currently looking at pCloud and Backblaze. I may go with both. If someone has a recommendation that has a native Linux client, and can support any file size, I am ears.
This won't fully replace my own remote backups. It will let me store a much larger set of them.
I'm still trying to decide what to do about the failed backup server. It doesn't do a whole lot in its current state. Replacing it with another live backup is more expensive in our current situation.
A cheaper option for a local backup would be to setup a local drive as a 'virtual slave', holding copies of the server's core configuration and data files, minus networking. That would have made recovery much faster. It's never a likely situation that something that destroys the server physically isn't going to take out the entire rack anyway.
Software
As much of a mess as SMF's code is, on review, I think I'm going to stick with SMF for Elliquiy over Xenforo.
There are a few reasons for this.
The main one is the fact I can actually fix the editor and we are a writing forum. Whatever your complaints about the new WYSIWYG editor here, it has fewer bugs than the one Xenforo comes packaged with, and I am not at the mercy of the devs when applying fixes for bugs that the upstream fixed months ago.
The second one is sheer efficiency. Xenforo puts orders of magnitudes more load on the CPU than my tuned copy of SMF does.
A third one is the Wiki/chat integrations are pretty stable, and I would have to rewrite them completely for Xenforo.
The code remains an utter mess, and I may look into some other open-source solution in time. I was hoping to bring us to Elkarte for awhile, but there is no real critical mass for development there, sadly.
Policy Update
One casualty of the upgrade has been what data integration remaining I had with Google, tracking site usage. I am no longer very interested.
Accordingly, my sites and servers no longer send anything to external services outside of user signup. On both forums, this goes to two services:
The first is to Stop Forum Spam. The reason is in the name.
The second is to Google's Recaptcha service. This is for the same reason.
This doesn't mean outside requests aren't possible. People tend to hotlink images for their posts fucking everywhere. This poses its own security and usability flaws, so I am considering forcing a whitelist of acceptable image/media hosts. I have a question thread here on BMR and here on Elliquiy. This doesn't need to be immediately exhaustive, but it should be large enough that questions about people wondering why their images aren't showing up shouldn't be too frequent.
Too Many Forums
Mainly for Elliquiy, but it is true BMR's forums could use some pruning and/or archiving. Fewer forums makes for a more active forum overall, generally.
I'll be going over this with the staff of each site, but if someone wants to put together suggestions, they are welcome to do so (in the Help/Questions/Suggestions forum on E/BMR).
Blue Moon Specific
My main goal for BMR is to get a good icon to enable PWA (Progressive Web App) functionality. It's been a bit of a back and forth with submissions, I should prolly just pick one.
Unfortunately as I mentioned above there is not much I can do about the editor bugs until Xenforo the company actually releases a patch.
A patch they could have pushed any time in the past four months.
Elliquiy Specific
Things that are done:
- The Wiki is running properly
- Search is back and on the daemon. I've rewritten the relevance algorithm significantly, and should hopefully function a lot better for people. I've also got it matching more European characters, though everything is currently transliterated into the standard English alphabet with a few extras (thorn/eth and ae/oe ligatures).
- Almost all old BBCode is working. Some old floats were not properly converted, and there seems to be an issue with padding.
List of stuff I want to get working before the new layout:
- Make Bookmarks into a proper extension
- Upgrade the Wiki to 1.35 (1.39 will need longer term fixing)
- Fix some performance issues with the site.
- Some special security stuffs.
- Do a mass fix for currently unspecified genders. (Got a backup of the old table in...)
- Fix the Ajax Chat and Ellibridge to Discord (Necessary for the new layout)
- Fix for profile custom text (make into addon) - easiest to do before making the new layout rather than after.
Once these are all set I can get to the new layout, people can start submitting custom css as before. This will be back to the old three-column design, though probably with fewer boards, among other familiar things.
