Site upgrades incoming!

[mach_kernel]

Greetings fellow Silicon Graphics enthusiasts!

What's happening?

Our site is much overdue for security patching and maintenance upgrades. In the next SGUG site release, we will be deploying:

• Xenforo v2.2.15
• Tactical v2.2.15
• UI.X v2.2.0 P3
• Nodes v1.1.1 P3
• Misc anti-spam and anti-bot plugin configuration changes and upgrades

One thing is going away: the Xenforo wiki. Nobody is using it. No point in keeping it around.

In addition to this, the infrastructure side will see the following changes:

• Full "enterprise-style" CI/CD with reproducible builds of the site, with a UAT environment
  • We can easily test any changes to the forum software, and do live rolling deploys
  • The whole site, its database, and related concerns can be moved to arbitrary cloud providers as the admin staff sees fit or necessary.
• CloudFlare DNS management
  • Another one of our efforts to curb traffic from known bot IPs and reduce forum spam
• Status page
  • We now track the uptime of the forums and RSE Yum repositories

Rollout plan

DATE: At some point during 2024-06-22 -> 2024-06-23.

• We are going to let our UAT environmentsoak for a period of 2 weeks
  • If uptime remains perfect, then we will update this post with a date for the cutover
• Site gets placed into maintenance mode
  • Database snapshot taken at this point-in-time, and promoted into the UAT environment
  • Maintenance mode gets turned off on the new environment
• DNS change to new server
  • Users will either see the maintenance banner, or the newly promoted site as DNS propagates
• Nameserver change to CloudFlare
  • Both zones will point to the new site, so users will notice no disruption

The snapshot/promotion of the new server should take about ~5 minutes (we measured!), with a maximum estimated downtime of about an hour (DNS propagation) but empirically much less for most users. The RSE repositories will be unaffected.

Thank you

We are so honored to see what has become of our little community experiment since starting it in 2019. It is because of our contributors that we have so much to show across: RSE, a big catalog of ported software, and endless threads & initiatives focused on preserving SGI knowledge for future generations of enthusiasts to come.

 

[7spirals]

Thank you sincerely for your work and good luck with the upgrades. I hope it goes smoothly. I'm sorry managing bots and griefers is such a chore, but I know it is.

 

[mach_kernel]

The DNS migration has started.

At some point this weekend I will announce on Discord that I'll put the site in maintenance mode to do the migration. It should take all of 5 minutes.

 

[mach_kernel]

Starting the site migration now

 

[mach_kernel]

Site upgrades are complete. Sorry if anyone saw the bad TLS error from CloudFlare, forgot to bounce the the workload with the new FQDN for a minute there.

You can report issues with the migration on this thread, otherwise I will close it in a week or two.

 

[johnnym]

You can report issues with the migration on this thread, otherwise I will close it in a week or two.

I think I just found one: The toolbar doesn't work correctly for my for the smilies and media buttons. When clicking on them I get the forum list shown, see attached screenshot. The other buttons seem to work fine though.

 

[johnnym]

Oh yeah, and editing an existing post also doesn't work, I get the forums list shown instead of my post for an edit.

 

[bitpak]

Same here. Editing, conversations button, and other pop-up menus show initial forums page, just like on the @johnnym screenshot above.

 

[johnnym]

I somehow managed to relogin here, after tryiing out if a logout and cleaning all cookies and site-data again could help. It did not work for the first few tries, ut eventually I got to the login form.

 

[mach_kernel]

Hey everyone,

We're aware of the issues but at the moment nobody is available to look into it. I've been dealing with a few things at work and have been feeling sick the last two weeks so there has been no spare time.

I am surprised that this did not come up during QA. We will investigate and try to ship a fix ASAP.

 

[mach_kernel]

I pushed out a change to the CloudFlare rules. Can ya'll try to reproduce again? Looks fixed on my end.

 

[bitpak]

Yes, now editing works fine as well as conversations button. Thanks!

 

[johnnym]

I pushed out a change to the CloudFlare rules. Can ya'll try to reproduce again? Looks fixed on my end.

Yes, now editing works fine as well as conversations button. Thanks!

I can confirm that. Also the not working buttons are working correctly again - thanks a lot for fixing and get back well soon @mach_kernel . I'll now try to logout and login again and report back later. EDIT: => Also works! Great! \o/