Upgrading Forum

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Iain
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Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well, that didn't go well. Forum and site was down for a bit this morning when I was trying to upgrade the forum software.

Time outs all over the place when running database migrations, which may have corrupted data when I kept on refreshing the page to see if they'd run the next time...

Anyway, it's just as well I back up things before doing upgrades these days, so I have restored DB and files, so everything should be as it was.

When I figure out a working method of increasing time out limits, I'll try again.
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Lloyd Mangram
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Lloyd Mangram »

8)
Once again I emerge from beneath a massive pile of paper which makes my desk groan to bring you the world’s most amazing posts.
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Backed up and restored successfully as well Lloyd. :)
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Professor Brian Strain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Professor Brian Strain »

Does seem to be an issue using "view new posts" - keeps showing me all posts since the outage, even ones I've read.
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

I wonder if that's something to do with sessions. Have you tried logging out and in again?
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Professor Brian Strain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Professor Brian Strain »

Iain wrote:I wonder if that's something to do with sessions. Have you tried logging out and in again?
That worked, thanks. (Usually keep myself logged in on the iPad for convenience)
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Lloyd Mangram »

Iain wrote:Backed up and restored successfully as well Lloyd. :)
:P
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Reminds me that I must get around to trying again.
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well, I tried a number of times to upgrade the board over the past couple of years and never got passed the time outs.

Recently I have been setting up a Ruby on Rails server on Digital Ocean and the thought stuck me, that I could set up a LAMP server and transfer over the backed up forum to that, files and database and try the upgrade over there and if all went well, bring back the new files and database back here.

If I got the same time out error, I would have full access and control over the server so I could probably find out the problem in a log somewhere. I have very limited access on the zzap64.co.uk managed shared server.

So that's what I did last night (got a copy of the forum running on my temporarily created LAMP server) and today, I tried the upgrade and it worked! No mention of time out errors.

So, probably tonight, I'll do the process again with a fresh backup of the forum and bring the result back here. The current style of the board will be gone and I'll have to hack back in the logo, but hopefully everything else will be good, I'll be paying close attention to attachments and avatars etc. to make sure they can still be uploaded etc.

Hopefully the latest version also has better protection against the spammers and I can open the board to new registration again and maybe even stop it getting hammered by the smappers even when they can't login / post.

So, great news overall!
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well I tried a live transfer and update tonight but got some errors related to templates, so I may not have done all the steps correctly.

I'll try again tomorrow night...
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well, I have spent all day on this...

As I said in the previous message, it worked the first time last night but when trying today with more up to date data it's didn't work the 2 to 10 or more times, trying various slightly different things.. until I thought about what was different about the first attempt (that worked) and it was that, the first time I was restoring the database to a blank database but for all the other times after, I was restoring it to a databse already with tables in it. Now the script is meant to DROP old tables before recreating new ones but something must not be working 100% with that....

So I tried again with a blank database and it worked!! Praise be!!

So the next step was to take the newly upgraded database and (probably) files from the temp server back to zzap64.co.uk, where I have a staging version of the forum and see what happened there. It looked like it worked but I couldn't log in, so that's an issue....

After a bit of research, it's to do with PHP versions. The temp server where I did the upgrade has a higher sub version than the max I can set it to here, so....

The solution is to change the PHP version on the temp sever. to the max version I can have here. Do the backup and upgrade again and bring back here and try again on the staging forum, so let's hope that'll work!

I've probably spent over 30 hours trying to upgrade this forum over the past year or so, so if I eventually get it done and working (which is close!), I hope people will write some messages in the future to have made it all worth while. :-D
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well.... it seems to be done. The forum is up and I'm logged in!

The front page of the site is dead with the PHP upgrade, but that should be easy enough to fix, I just have to put an extra i in front of the database module.

Hopefully, uploading attachments and avatars and the like still work. I'll do some testing over the next while. I also have to put back the logo.

If anybody notices anything strange, do let me know here. The board's old style had to be retired I am afraid, no choice in the matter, but this is the generic phpBB style so we should all be used to it elsewhere anyway.

Anyway, I'm off to fix the front page and probably need to fix the recent messages bit there as well, hopefully it'll still work with a few small changes... :-/
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Iain
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Well, that's the front page fixed up. A bit more to do than I thought, but nothing too mad. Nothing like editing a live page with errors showing all the place! :-D
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by Iain »

Proper Zzap! logo is back on the top, along with link to the main site. So I think that's the visual stuff done.

Now to fix the email sending stuff since I think people probably can't reset their password as it stands, which isn't good.
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Re: Upgrading Forum

Post by andy vaisey »

Thanks for your efforts Iain.

Having messed around in the past with phpBB software, I know it can be a pain in the rear end!
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