It has been a little more than 3.5 years since the last upgrade (see It's time for a LDDb.com hardware upgrade!) and the hardware is not really an issue... but the Operating System is (Debian 8: not maintained anymore since June).

Updating the whole OS from Debian 8 to 9 or 10 on the main server is quite scary.
Doing a parallel validation and switching to the new server when ready is much, much more recommended.
It just requires to pay for both during the migration preparation time, some of the donations will be used for that.

=> http://163.172.34.149/

For most users the difference will only be a 4~24h downtime while the DNS get refreshed.
But for me, it will be several busy evenings and weekends

Julien

Thanks for your work.

As above - thank-you Julien.

What you have done & do here really is appreciated.

Excited. Thanks for the refresh.

Whenever it can be done I would like to start donating again. thanks for everything you do.

Thank you Julian, sincerely. Without you this hobby would not be where it is today.

All right, I'm spending my (rainy) weekend on this.

So far:

Good news: most of the customs packages I was using from source in Debian 8 are standard in Debian 10 now.
Good news: MariaDB (MySQL replacement) is much faster

Bad news: I initially setup the 3 x 250GB SSD for maximum capacity but if we lose one disk we lose everything. Must reinstall from scratch in RAID 5.
Bad news: PHP7 breaks a LOT of legacy PHP4/5 code for LDDb. That could be a HUGE problem but... I'm lucky!

=> https://cloudwafer.com/blog/installing-multiple-versions-of-php-on-debian/

I will be able to move to the new server while retaining most of the compatibility with PHP5, giving me plenty of time to fix the code for PHP7 on my dev laptop pushing upgrading.

So... back to partitioning and full reinstall!

Julien

The very definition of bad luck.

Spent the day waiting for the 2 re-installations attempts to complete:

https://status.scaleway.com/incident/998



Julien

The server I was assigned kept crashing every hour... 2 of the 3 SSDs were faulty.

Got a new one, starting everything from scratch again!

=> http://163.172.105.186/

Julien

Here's hoping it goes more smoothly now!

Even better!

https://cloudwafer.com/blog/installing-multiple-versions-of-php-on-debian/
+
https://devanswers.co/run-multiple-php-versions-on-apache/
=
Can have each virtual/subdomain on a specific version of PHP, not globally PHP5 or PHP7.

I can probably start migrating everything very soon thanks to this hack.

Julien

Done!

If you can read this, you are on the forum running on the new server.

It seems that even my user sessions were retained (not sure how that worked!) from the old to new server.
Probably through cookies related to the domain that are re-created to extend the current session?

Update details on https://www.lddb.com/history.php?version=3.4

Old server termination requested (Nov 1st) to avoid paying one extra month of hosting for nothing.

Julien