Archive for the ‘ArniesAirsoft Updates’ Category

There’s been a few errors that crept in after the software upgrade and server move. We’re working on them as we go.

New forum registrations: an error prevented new users from registering on the forums. This has now been fixed.

PMs: Private messages are being imported from the old forum software there are a lot to import and it’s nearly done. Once this is complete the PM system will be re-enabled in the forums.

Reformat old posts: There’s still a few older topics/posts that need to be reformatted in the forums where the code doesn’t look quite right. There’s 2 million posts in the forum, so it’s going to take some time for the server to go through and change/edit all of these.

There are other issues that we’re aware of but we’ll get to them later on.

Here’s the story so far; we’re on a new server and we’ve upgraded to the latest operating system and a larger spec machine. The site team have also upgraded the software on the box and the hosting software. We’re now running the latest version of the forum and news software.

Working so far:

• forums upgraded and working
• news upgraded and working
• archived (old) articles/reviews working
• news page re-skinned
• server optimized as best we can for now while the updates take hold

To do:

• Get user-driven ReviewPost engine working again
• rebuild forum PMs (currently lots missing as upgrade has not been done yet)
• rebuild forum posts 2 million to do.. it’ll take about 3 days to do it.
• reskin/design forum look

At present there’s a forum rebuild going on so the site may be slightly slower than we’d like for the next few hours while this takes place. There’s a lot of code crunching going on in the background. The latest bugs and “gotchas” that we are working on are listed in our support forums.

Our final domain shift is taking place over next 24-48hours as we just update our domain nameservers. This shouldn’t affect things for the end user however it’s worth mentioning.

The forums are now back thanks to the efforts of the upgrading technicians and the people that wrote the forum software. Things have been massively upgraded so will look completely different. There’s loads for us to do still however the gallery and forum section are live for registered users.

Please have a look and check things out for yourself. Any issues, please leave them in the usual site error section in the forums.

We are now progressing to moving all our data to a new server and updating our service for everyone. So that everyone is aware this will mean some downtime while the data is copied over and the site software is all upgraded/updated.

The projected timeline is as follows:

• 30/03/2010 2200hrs GMT server forums locked.
• 30/03/2010 2200-0400hrs GMT server data copied to new system.
• 30/03/2010 0400-1200hrs GMT all services and software upgraded.
• 31/03/2010 ~2100hrs GMT new server verified and double checked as working. Nameserver/DNS records are then updated to point to new server. Old server traffic directed to new system.
• 31/03/2010 ~2200hrs GMT server forums unlocked.

There’s a whole heap to do in the new move as we are having a 3 year old software set upgraded. The server core software, the hosting software on top of that and the site code on top of that will all be upgraded and updated.

This will mean (fingers crossed) that we have a much faster and efficient setup, set to expand and support the demands of the ever increasing traffic.

News posts: News posts will be added to the server up until everything is locked for backup (the site will be viewable as normal but we won’t update anything). We will then wait for the backup to complete and afterwards continue to update news on the old server and the service posts to let you know how the update is going.

Send in your news as usual to us, we’ll work on what we can when we can at the usual fast pace.

Forums: Forums will only be unlocked once the new server is up and running. Otherwise any posts made will be lost after the move (we can copy news posts over).

Stay tuned for updates folks!

We have a heap of upgrades planned so I’m afraid there may be some bumpy connections to the server over this week. We have a lot of data to copy backup and move around in preparation for some serious upgrades that are long overdue on here.

There may be periods of slower than usual performance while this happens. Apologies but we’re doing quite a lot in the background. I’ll post updates as and when I can during this period.

I’ll post up and give some warning as I’ll have to lock the forums from posting at some point this week so that we can move the forum data live to the new setup.

The end result should be a refreshed site, faster service to everyone and a cleaner site and look.

Update 25/03/2010: Latest mysql dump taken (service taken offline briefly to obtain copy). Last leg of remote backups carrying on at present.