Upgrade Update

A bit more information about the upcoming update. =)

First, it's taking a bit longer to get a lot of the data copied over to the new server, so I might have to postpone the downtime by another day. I'm still shooting for a Wednesday morning update, but do know that it might be postponed if all the necessary ducks aren't in a row by then.

Second, while AQ is down, I obviously won't be able to post regular updates about the progress there. So look for updates on Atlas Quest's Facebook page--that's where most of my updating will be. I might be posting to this blog as well. (Even though this blog does use the atlasquest.com domain, it uses a blog.atlasquest.com subdomain and is hosted on Google's servers--if I do things right, this blog should stay up during the entire update.)

But with the status option so easy to post short updates on progress on Facebook, that's where you'll see me posting most regularly. =)

In the comments of my last post, Greg asked about posting a link to the new IP address. When the new site is actually up and running, I'll post the new IP address there and if you have the technical skills to add it to your hosts file, you can speed your access to the new AQ server. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, though, leave well enough alone. Eventually, the new IP address will propagate and you'll be able to get on again--hopefully within a few hours.

If you're wondering why I don't just create a link direct to the IP address, some of the code on the website depends on the URL being for "www.atlasquest.com"--if you try to link directly to the IP address, it'll redirect you to www.atlasquest.com, and if the IP address hasn't propagated, it'll just send you back to the old website.

There was also a question about if I could put the old server into a "read only" mode. It's a little tricky to do this since AQ was never designed to work in a "read only" mode. Technically, I could update the code and probably make something like that work, but with scripts that run as cron jobs, different ways to log in (auto-login, manual login, app login, cached logins, and who knows what I've forgotten), it would take quite a bit of work to make it reliable. And even if I could stop everyone from logging in, there's still stuff being logged--anonymous visitors who view a clue cause clue hits, searches for addresses or cities might cause an unknown location to be added to the database.

Basically, the only easy way to make sure the database stops changing is just to shut down the entire website while the data is being transferred over.

And, I'm cautiously optimistic the site will only be down for less than a day. You'll live. ;o)

So that's the skinny about what's going on. I'll post again tomorrow night with another update. I'll also have a better idea then if I'll need to postpone the switch to the new server.