New Forums Server

[roddy]

If you're reading this, you've successfully made it to our shiny new server. Congratulations.

The site should be working exactly as previously. The move involved a minor upgrade (there's still a major one in the works, believe it or not) and some behind the scenes changes to the way the attachments system works, but the front-end user experience should be the same as before. Should you notice any new issues (or want to prod me about an old one) let me know.

One predictable glitch is that read topic markers - ie, whether or not a topic appears to have 'new' posts - may well be out of sync, as you were reading them on the old server after the database was shifted. Things will work normally from now on, and if you want you can mark all posts read via the 'Mark Forums Read' link under Quick Links in the header.

For those interested - we've shifted from our previous home on a UK-based reseller account, and are now on a US-based VPS. The VPS is very much overkill in terms of disk space and bandwidth, but shared hosting was becoming a bit limiting.

The move took a bit longer than I'd hoped as I hit some server configuration issues, but the new hosts sorted that out reassuringly quickly once I'd figured out it wasn't something I could fix. The main delay was propagation of the updated info for the domain - in the past I've found that was usually done within 24 hours, but in this case it's coming up for a full day and it doesn't even seem to have started. Hopefully things will kick off soon - otherwise you may never read this . . .

Edited January 27, 2010 at 08:39 AM by roddy

[skylee]

Thank you for the hard (it is hard, right?) work.

[roddy]

It is when you don't know what you're doing

It hasn't been too bad, although I've had to learn a few new things (never hurts) and may yet have to learn more. Would be able to get things done a lot quicker if I was doing it again.

If anyone is able to currently access the new server (ie, you can read this) with the Chinese-forums.com domain, I'd be interested to know about it. That hasn't happened as quickly as it usually does, but there isn't really much I can do about it.

[animal world]

Congrats on the smooth upgrade.

As of 6:22 am Pacific Time i cannot read this via the Chinese Forum domain. Will have a peek every now and then as the day progresses.

[jbradfor]

Thanks for the work!

Question: for new posts with links to internal threads / posts, for now we need to use the IP address until all the DNS are updated. However, at some point in the future we should probably change the IP address back to the domain name. Can you do a simple search-and-replace, or should we edit our posts in a week or so?

[roddy]

I'm hoping that the domain name will start working in the very near future - if it's not by the time I wake up tomorrow I'll look into why. Assuming you're linking to a thread created before the server move the best thing is to link using chinese-forums.com - it'll send people back to the old server, which might be a little confusing, but it shouldn't be a major hassle. Or if you need to use the IP address, make a mental note to go back and edit it later.

I should maybe have just waited for the domain to kick in and not bothered giving you the IP address, but you all looked so forlorn hanging around the old server, aimlessly clicking on 'new posts' . . .

A few links to the IP address won't be fatal.

Edited January 27, 2010 at 03:39 PM by roddy

[jbradfor]

It can take some time for all the cached translations in the DNS servers to age out and get the new ones. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that some servers set the age-out period pretty long, up to a week, so it could take some time.

Also, I've run into an error. Twice now when I posted, the new post was accepted, but I got an error about the server.

[xifbk]

The TTL on the DNS for the domain name is set to 24 hours, so it will take up to 24 hours for everyone to be updated. Next time you can decrease the TTL for your DNS to 5 minutes, so that when you make the change everyone gets updated immediately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live#DNS_records

[Daan]

Thanks for the hard work Roddy! Unfortunately, http://www.chinese-forums.com/ still points to the old server on Google DNS, and I would assume they update their records pretty frequently.

[xifbk]

Daan, if you read my above post it explains why the update is not in Google DNS.

DNS results are cached for a set amount of time. The owner of the DNS entry controls that set time. The time for chinese-forums.com is set for 24 hours so it will take up to 24 hours before google dns is updated.

[roddy]

Yep, but I updated the details 36 hours ago now. I also can't see the DNS updated anywhere - normally I'd expect it to happen with some ISPs very quickly.

Will drop someone a line and see if I can't speed things along.

Jbradfor (or anyone) if you get any errors it would be useful if you can copy and paste the message into a post report or email (admin@...) and send it in.

(edit: Ok, I found the error reports and have changed some configuration settings. If you get database errors you can let me know if you want, but for the next day or two at least I'll be keeping a close eye on those. Anything else let me know.)

Edited January 28, 2010 at 06:10 AM by roddy

[Meng Lelan]

Oh zowie this forum is back online, just in time for me to scurry in and start up February's Story of the Month.

[roddy]

Getting the domain pointing in the right direction is proving to be a pain. Have stuck up a message on the old server for people to just use the ip address for now if they want.

Welcome to all those finding their way here, and apologies for the lack of Chinese-forums.com lovin' this week. We'll make it up to you, promise

Edited January 28, 2010 at 02:25 PM by roddy

[jbradfor]

With the new server, I noticed that the font got a lot smaller. Too small for my old-and-soon-needs-bifocals eyes. I fixed it by going to quick links -> edit options and then changed the Forum Skin to default - larger fonts. But I'm a bit surprised this changed, I thought this was only a server change? Any other changes we can look forward to? I also just noticed that in the new posts screen, if the icon on the left has an arrow coming out of the folder it means that the user has posted to that forum, and if you hover over it it says how many posts. Is this new, or have I just never noticed it?

[roddy]

I didn't change any fonts. However, there might be some browser / domain thing going on - I'm not sure if any browsers actually do this, but perhaps you increased the font size (eg, CTRL + in Firefox) in your browser, it saved that for Chinese-forums.com, and as at the moment you're not using that domain, the font shrank again.

The icon thing I'm pretty sure was like that in the first place.

One possible issue is that images (icons and so on rather than attachments) may still be getting pulled from the old server and could be slow or . . . not there.

Edited January 28, 2010 at 04:33 PM by roddy

[Outofin]

jbradfor, both FireFox and IE offer very a nice zoom-in feature. (IE7 doesn't do it nicely, but IE8 does.) Just press Ctrl-+. Not only older people find this feature useful. Small monitors with high resolution can make fonts unreasonably small too.

roddy, at least for me so far so good. I noticed you just changed all links to "chinese-forums.com" to the actual IP address. Now everything works for me with no problem at all. But many people didn't follow here. Hope you fix the issue soon.

[jbradfor]

@Outofin, thanks, but I know about that feature. However, other web page font size is fine, it's just CF that suddenly got small. So I don't want to change the font size for all pages, and I'm too lazy to keep increasing it for just CF.

[roddy]

Hope you fix the issue soon.

It's top of my list, believe me. Already set up a test website this morning, and I haven't even cleaned my teeth or been to McDonald's.

Technical explanation: when I updated the nameservers they got rejected as invalid, but I didn't get told that. The host says their nameservers are fine. Have successfully used them with another registrar, so am inclined to agree. Have gone back to the domain registrar to ask them to try again, or explain what the problem is. If this doesn't work I can transfer the domain to another registrar.

Non-technical explanation: We moved house but the postman won't listen when I tell him. If necessary I can get a new postman.

Right, time for a McMuffin. After I clean my teeth.

[adrianlondon]

Lucky you. I'm currently in a country where a medium Big Mac meal costs the equivalent of 84.5y.

[skylee]

Is there something wrong with the Chinese Corner (a sub-forum)? I wanted to post a new joke to the "Jokes" thread, but whenever I tried to access the Chinese Corner, it seemed that it went back to the old server. I am not sure if I should simply log on again and post there.