Server Move

[Ian]

At some point in the next week (between 5th-12th April), we'll be moving the Keyboard Forums from the current server to a nice shiny new one .

It should be a little bit faster, but the main reason for the move is to make sure that we're able to keep current with PHP/MySQL releases that run the forum software.

The move should be relatively painless, with perhaps ~30 mins or so when I'll need to "freeze" the site so that no content is lost during the move. Once that is done, it will take some time for DNS servers to catch up with the new server location... however I will do my best to make sure that the old server can share the new database so this isn't a problem.

Once I know a little more about when the move will take place, I'll post more here. I'm going to try and wait for a quiet time when not many people are online and then pounce .

 

[goldi5210]

Good luck!

 

[Ian]

It was quiet on here so I took the plunge and moved us over to the new server .

It may be slow for a day or two, as it's quite likely that most people are still browsing the old server while DNS caches update - however both servers are in sync until the old one disappears on Sunday.

 

[Wes]

In the future, you should change the TTL in the SOA record of your DNS zone to something like 1800 seconds before an upgrade like this. Of course, you should also change it well in advance (depending what the TTL is by default on your nameserver). This will make it basically unnecessary to run parallel machines which must be kept in sync.

Although -- it looks like your TTL is already set to 3600. If you had traffic more than an hour after cutover on the old server -- the users in question either have broken computers, routers, or ISPs.

Wes

 

[Ian]

Thanks Wes . For some reason, even though the TTL is low we keep getting around 10% of traffic where the ISP DNS servers don't pay attention - in some cases it looks like there's still legit traffic up to a week after the switch (although that's few and far between).

For the transfer, I synced the MySQL database first and then just switched the DB connection host on the old server - it meant it was a little slower for users with an outdated DNS cache but kept downtime very low.

 

[Wes]

10%, wow, that's really terrible. Are these mostly North American clients? We used to have a lot of problems with AOL proxies back in the day, but nothing that bad in a long time....ISPs should really be paying a lot more attention these days since low TTL geographic load distribution is getting more and more common. My traffic is 90+% Canadian, so we could easily be looking at lower numbers of ISPs playing silly games.

10-15 years ago when this crap was much worse, I used to tunnel port 80 between old and new hosts when they were on different physical networks... very effective and easy to set up (run ssh from inittab)

Wes

 

[Ian]

It seems to be proportionately higher from Asia, but I'm wondering if I just stop the old IP from resolving if it will just force their DNS cache to update. The plug is being pulled on the old servers later on today, so I guess we'll find out soon .