hankster
11-27-2005, 12:53 PM
As some may have noticed over the weekend the forum was off-line, slow to respond or threw out some error messages. This was caused by the previously announced attempt to upgrade the forum software.
Our normal procedure on upgrades is to make a current backup of the forum and then perform the upgrade on that backup. If the upgrade is successful we just make the now upgraded backup the main forum and keep the old non-upgraded hidden for a few days to make sure there are no unforeseen problems. The advantage of this is if there are problems during the upgrade, the original forum is still available and switching back to it is easy.
During our upgrade to the backed up version we encountered a number of problems. The main problem was found to be copying the actual database over to the test/upgrade area. The database is well over 500 Meg in size and the copying (restore) process would “die” before the copy was complete resulting in an incomplete copy.
After a number of tries using various options and methods we were able to complete the copy and have a successful upgrade on that copy. Once upgraded I checked the functionality of the upgrade and discovered that the Trader Ratings add-on was not operating properly. Since the Trader Ratings is an important feature that we have available I decided to not make the upgraded “live” until this add-on is fixed by the author and works properly.
So at this point we are still on the old version of the forum software. The testing of the upgrade over the weekend did bring to light some other hitches in the process that I was able to work out so that when the Trader Ratings do get fixed the upgrade should go smoothly.
Sorry for the brief times the forum was down over the weekend but using this time was best as traffic is normally pretty light during the Thanksgiving weekend. It did help bring to light a few that cropped up and gave me an idea of how long it should take to complete the upgrade once we go ahead and do it. I will announce later when we plan on making the final upgrade.
Our normal procedure on upgrades is to make a current backup of the forum and then perform the upgrade on that backup. If the upgrade is successful we just make the now upgraded backup the main forum and keep the old non-upgraded hidden for a few days to make sure there are no unforeseen problems. The advantage of this is if there are problems during the upgrade, the original forum is still available and switching back to it is easy.
During our upgrade to the backed up version we encountered a number of problems. The main problem was found to be copying the actual database over to the test/upgrade area. The database is well over 500 Meg in size and the copying (restore) process would “die” before the copy was complete resulting in an incomplete copy.
After a number of tries using various options and methods we were able to complete the copy and have a successful upgrade on that copy. Once upgraded I checked the functionality of the upgrade and discovered that the Trader Ratings add-on was not operating properly. Since the Trader Ratings is an important feature that we have available I decided to not make the upgraded “live” until this add-on is fixed by the author and works properly.
So at this point we are still on the old version of the forum software. The testing of the upgrade over the weekend did bring to light some other hitches in the process that I was able to work out so that when the Trader Ratings do get fixed the upgrade should go smoothly.
Sorry for the brief times the forum was down over the weekend but using this time was best as traffic is normally pretty light during the Thanksgiving weekend. It did help bring to light a few that cropped up and gave me an idea of how long it should take to complete the upgrade once we go ahead and do it. I will announce later when we plan on making the final upgrade.