1,000,000 post thread

[cleonard]

Originally Posted by bootNumlock

ohio is pretty cool in my opinion...

Now you're talking Boot!!!

Actually I'm originally from Skyline's territory and moved down here 21 years ago. Wish I had gone just a little farther south though.

It's tough being the only U of M fan in Ohio though . . . the grief I take.

[bootNumlock]

does anyone remember back when this site was filled with tech support issues, discusions of server outages -- man, vortech really has made this place boring with all the great running servers, networks, etc.

i guess it's good to be bored every once in a while.

Keep up the great work, team!

[Dean]

Don't worry. The H-Sphere 2.5 upgrade will make it a *really* exciting place. That upgrade is going to suck...hardcore.

[Silverbug]

hope you get overtime

[Dean]

heh...

[cleonard]

Hey Dean . . .
Really now . . . Do you ever sleep?
Seems like you're always on call, on the board or answering my tickets.
Brad, you really need to give Dean a raise and some time off

Uh, Dean, I'll PM you my address where to send the check

[Dean]

Hah.

Since I am under the misguided, self-imposed illusion that I can talk with impunity on this thread...I'm gonna ramble about the H-Sphere 2.5 update I've been working on.

This update is pretty darn scary. I've been testing it in pieces, seeing how it is likely to affect different servers on different OSes. The Win2k3 update doesn't seem that bad, but the Win2k one is going to cause some headaches. See..in H-Sphere 2.5 the permissions structure for Windows is totally different. They changed it because it is *supposed* to be more secure and it allows for things like Windows sub-FTP accounts. Unfortunately, the update binary removes all permissions and then applies the new scheme. Since it adds and re-propagates permissions, the update takes forever..over 2 hours in my tests (on a test server with no load). Also, since it removes all permissions..we're going to lose the custom ASPNET permissions on some domains as well as the read-attributes that allow DNN installs to work. Resetting all of those is going to take more time that the upgrade itself.

On the CP side of things, we're going to lose just about all of our custom templates. PSoft decided it would be best to come up with a brand new way of modifying templates. At last glance, we have over 150 customized pages that have to be re-encoded.

The only other hurdle I can see is going to be the MySQL upgrade to 4.1. The PSoft scripts do the upgrade by dumping every database, running some 'sed' scripts against them to make them 4.1-compliant and then re-import the data. My tests show it working (albeit slow), but real-life updates have a way of not always mirroring the controlled tests.

The more I look at this upgrade, the more I am convinced that some servers could be without CP access for several days. Worse than that, I can see the upgrade causing some sites more than a little downtime after the update is run.

I don't mean to scare anyone reading this, but I wanted to maybe give you a pregame heads-up as to what to look forward to.

[Silverbug]

Well it may be scary, but at least we know what we're in for and we can all start taking steps to notify our clients etc about the pending update.

Far better to know what may happen in detail than to know just the basics.

[PeterD]

Anyone know if phpmyadmin and oscommerce are in psoft's upgrade path?

[Dean]

The osCommerce skeleton files will be updated by the H-Sphere upgrade scripts. phpMyAdmin is not controlled by H-Sphere, so I can have that upgraded next week.

[suki]

Dean, it may make sense to update the Win 2000 servers to Win 2003 before running the update, I know theirs a lot of them, but if the OS upgrade is not that painful and if it eliminates many problems with the 2.5?

Originally Posted by Dean

Hah.
The Win2k3 update doesn't seem that bad, but the Win2k one is going to cause some headaches.

[Dean]

Its not a bad idea, but I'm not sure how we would go about it. I would love to lose the Win2k boxes.

Running the MS 2003 upgrade is out of the question since those always suck. I suppose we could install a parallel box and run our restore procedure on it. This would be similar to the NT16 crash, just non-emergency. I'm pretty sure that the migration will still have issues of its own.

It could work, I guess its a matter of how long people are willing to wait for H-Sphere 2.5, .NET2.0, and MySQL4.1. Upgrading 47 servers would probably take about 4 months (at 3 per week).

[suki]

Well if it reduces greatly the risk of things going wrong with 2.5 then a few more months is worth it.

I think I speak for us all or most of us anyway here when I say that existing clients are always more important than new clients and the last thing we need is an upgrade that creates problems for many .net/DNN sites as I assume their are many thousands on all the win2k boxes.

The upgrade will affect them all at the same time and combined with any mySQL issues - unless you can bring in the National Guard to help out with support – it is going to clearly create major problems for a while for everyone and I for one would vote to push off 2.5 for a few more months longer if it greatly reduces the potential for problems – and usually most clients understand if its going to take a few months longer after explaining to them the issues.

Also Win 2003 OS change from client side is not without problems – every site that uses CDONTS to send mail will stop working and the script needs to change plus conection issues with MS Access sites (which is also good as they have to code properly now and close connections etc) – but if we know in advance and give notice to clients then it should be a minor issue.

[suki]

Dean/Admin any update on the H-Sphere 2.5 situation - any kind of timeframe or roadmap to the update would be good.