Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

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Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by mingstar »

[Migration postponed until tomorrow, February 9, at 05:30 AM --admin LadyGeek]

We've enjoyed a excellent service at our current hosting facility under very generous terms. The facility and their service has been flawless.

I intend to migrate the website from that facility, running on "bare metal" machines that I own, into a hosting facility using virtual servers. The primary reason for this migration is my concern about the long term reliability and sustainability of my machines. Should hardware ever fail, recovery is faster and easier in a virtual environment.

The availability of virtual servers has also allowed me to design a clustered configuration which should adapt more easily to our growth.

The new cluster is being hosted in a facility in Dallas, TX, with a highly regarded provider. My interactions with the provider have been exemplary. They have a good team and the technical staff is both eager and well equipped to answer questions and solve problems.

LadyGeek and I have reviewed the new system and are confident that we're ready to move.

So, Feb 8, 2021, at 06:30 EST I will shut down the current site and begin the migration.

My target is to have the website online at the new facility by 08:00 AM.

We'll be very attentive to the site tomorrow -- we'll be watching it like hawks.

Larry Auton
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST

Post by LadyGeek »

This thread is in the Forum Issues and Administration forum, but appears in all forums.

I clarified the thread title to mean that the site will be unavailable until we show up at our new home.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Cheez-It Guy »

Cool!
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by GrowthSeeker »

Thanks for the heads-up.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by texas lawdog »

Good luck! :sharebeer :sharebeer
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

I would suggested that MediaWiki:Sitenotice - Bogleheads should also be used to advise wiki editors and readers of the planned downtime.

There have been other instances where software updates of the forum have taken the website offline. Using the wiki's sitenotice as well as posting announcements here might be considered as part of the standard operating procedure. It is quite possible that wiki editors and/or readers might not visit the forum so could might any announcement there.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Good idea, thanks. The site notice is now in the wiki. See: MediaWiki:Sitenotice

FYI - The site notice does not display in a mobile device.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by BionicBillWalsh »

The dreaded Y21K prophecy that has long been foretold is upon us...
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Wiggums »

Good luck with the migration
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by UpperNwGuy »

Maybe Vanguard should hire you guys to fix their site.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by WoodSpinner »

Great move! Working in a Virtual Server environment is sooo much easier!

Thanks for all the hard work!

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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by chalet »

what is the plan for the nameservers, TTL, etc?
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

^^^ DNS, etc. will be taken care of by mingstar.

Bumping for visibility.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Stinky »

See you on the other side! (I hope)
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we need to postpone until tomorrow.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by mingstar »

Oh well -- unforeseen circumstances have scrubbed the mission for today. I'm resetting for 2021-02-09 at 0530 EST.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by samsoes »

BionicBillWalsh wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 7:32 pm The dreaded Y21K prophecy that has long been foretold is upon us...
Wow, that's unexpected, since it's 18,979 years early!
Who wouldda thunk!

(Y21K = year 21,000.)
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

I confirmed the time change with mingstar and have updated the thread title.

The migration will start at 05:30 (5 AM Eastern, 10:30 UTC) - 1 hour earlier.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-08 at 06:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

LadyGeek wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 7:32 pm Good idea, thanks. The site notice is now in the wiki. See: MediaWiki:Sitenotice

FYI - The site notice does not display in a mobile device.
The one-day delay provided an opportunity to fix the wiki.

Mobile devices will now see the wiki's site notice.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by asset_chaos »

Thank you LadyGeek and mingstar for your exemplarary service to our Bogleheads community.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by nisiprius »

Good luck, mingstar and LadyGeek.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Thanks! Bumping for visibility.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by galawdawg »

Here's hoping all goes well. Thanks as always for providing such a fantastic forum! :beer
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

We're back, all OK.

Welcome to the cloud!!! :beer
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by markjk »

LadyGeek wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 6:17 am We're back, all OK.

Welcome to the cloud!!! :beer
Nice! Glad cutover went well. That stuff can be stressful ... appreciate everyone that works to keep the site up and running.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Harry Livermore »

Seems a bit slow. (do I mean latency? not sure)
I click a link and it's quite a while for the thread to load.
Other websites seem to behave as expected. But it could be on my end I suppose...
Just a data point for you.
Cheers

ETA: it seems hit or miss. Now it's working as usual. So maybe disregard...
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Expect things to run slow for a while, we're starting on a new server. Things have to come up to speed.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by oldcomputerguy »

Glad to see the forum back. For what it's worth, I haven't noticed any particular slowness here, but I've only been on a few minutes.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Stinky »

FWIW, I see that Lady Geek proclaimed the site “open” at 17 minutes after the hour.

But I was not able to access the site until almost 50 minutes after the hour.

Oh, well ....
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by oldcomputerguy »

Stinky wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 6:57 am FWIW, I see that Lady Geek proclaimed the site “open” at 17 minutes after the hour.

But I was not able to access the site until almost 50 minutes after the hour.

Oh, well ....
It might have taken a bit more time for the DNS changes to migrate out to the servers in use at your ISP. I wasn't involved at all with this migration, so that's just a guess, but I've done some similar tasks in my working career.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

This thread no longer appearing at the top of every forum.

mingstar and I are 'watching this forum like a hawk'. We're fine-tuning the clustered configuration.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by GuyInFL »

Site is working well for me! Thanks
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by livesoft »

LadyGeek wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:39 am mingstar and I are 'watching this forum like a hawk'. We're fine-tuning the clustered configuration.
Like itworks's hawk (slightly cross-eyed)?
itworks wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 9:20 pm ...
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by peppers »

Everything is running flawlessly.

Once again precision execution.

:thumbsup
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Stinky »

Great work team!

While the site was down, I authorized a donation to the Bogle Center from our DAF. Check is in the mail.

Thanks so much for all you do.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by nisiprius »

:beer
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

Notification emails do not appear to be going out. LadyGeek has been advised.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by buhlaxtus »

I'm able to reach https://www.bogleheads.org , but not http://bogleheads.org . Not sure what's going on there.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by FinIndyGal »

Peculiar_Investor wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 8:52 am Notification emails do not appear to be going out. LadyGeek has been advised.
I unfortunately haven't automatically received "Topic Reply Notifications" where the name of the post is also in the subject line of the email since that software update a few months ago. The only way I receive these emails is if I go into the Board Index, open a topic and use the drop down to subscribe to a topic, and I'll only receive them then if someone replies to a post after I subscribe it. I really wish I could still receive them automatically in my email Inbox like I used to. I am subscribed to receive them, but something happened when they did that update. :confused
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Peculiar_Investor »

FinIndyGal wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:21 pm since that software update a few months ago
We know, viewtopic.php?f=3&t=330270. This is different, since the server migration this morning there are NO notification emails going out to anyone. LadyGeek and mingstar are aware and are working on it.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by Jacotus »

Thank you to mingstar and LadyGeek!
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by FinIndyGal »

Peculiar_Investor wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:42 pm
FinIndyGal wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:21 pm since that software update a few months ago
We know, viewtopic.php?f=3&t=330270. This is different, since the server migration this morning there are NO notification emails going out to anyone. LadyGeek and mingstar are aware and are working on it.
Thanks for your reply because it made me realize that I also haven't received any email notifications since 5:22 am.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Mail notifications have been fixed.

Anything sent before the time of my post won't be received.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by BolderBoy »

Well done on the migration!
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

Thanks, much appreciated.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by mingstar »

What a merry chase! LadyGeek and I had a lot of fun with this. We both learned a lot in a fairly short time.

The site is now running a mostly vanilla instantiation of a distributed, load-balanced, web cluster:

Code: Select all

(Internet) ---> [load balancer] ---> [multiple web servers] ---> [file and database server]
The web servers are CPU-centric machines with very little disk i/o; pretty much all they do with their local disk is write logs
(Yes... we will set up a log server soon.)

The file and database server has a bunch of RAM to keep as much as possible in core.
(hint: RAM is faster than disk -- "Important safety tip. Thanks Egon")

There were a few really interesting aspects of trying to run the software behind a load balancer but once they were well understood, the solutions were straightforward. I will be making some suggestions to the Wordpress development team.

One of the key goals of this project was to make things as "ordinary" as possible. I wanted the both the code base and the procedures to be found in the simple set of instructions that you get in the first ten hits on your favorite search engine. I think we've done a pretty good job.

Another goal was that I wanted the system to be able to scale quickly and easily and to accommodate a wide variety of computing resources. We started this morning with five web servers, all small, all the same. By noon, we realized that they were not going to be able to keep up when we hit the evening peak load so, within about ten minutes, we scaled up to ten small web servers. By mid-afternoon, we had enough data to see that different parts of the site have very different performance constraints and characteristics. By evening, we had scaled back down to four web servers but with different parts of the site handled by different classes of machine. All of this was done with the site "live" and without significant service interruption.

We will continue to watch and learn. For performance tuning, we believe that it's better to measure than to guess. This infrastructure decouples many of the components of the site in ways that make getting accurate measurements possible. It's a rare and fascinating opportunity.

Larry
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by sycamore »

Thanks for the progress reports, Larry & LadyGeek. The BH community is fortunate to have dedicated admins keeping the site going!

Is it safe to say that a successful migration means (1) lowered overall costs - presumably having virtual servers is cheaper than physical servers? and (2) easier maintenance/less time required for the BH admins?
mingstar wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:00 pm There were a few really interesting aspects of trying to run the software behind a load balancer but once they were well understood, the solutions were straightforward. I will be making some suggestions to the Wordpress development team.
Just curious what part of bogleheads uses Wordpress - just the blogging feature?
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by LadyGeek »

sycamore wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:17 pm Is it safe to say that a successful migration means (1) lowered overall costs - presumably having virtual servers is cheaper than physical servers? and (2) easier maintenance/less time required for the BH admins?
(1) Cost was one of the things we optimized for. After all, this is a financial forum. :) Our main goal was to come as close as possible to (or better than) what we had before. It's classic system trade study. The standard criteria apply: Speed - complexity - cost. Pick any two.

We tested as much as we could beforehand, but it can't replace doing this with live traffic.

(2) Yes, absolutely easier and much faster than recovering to a hardware server. Once everything is setup, all we need to do is restore from an archived snapshot.
sycamore wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:17 pm Just curious what part of bogleheads uses Wordpress - just the blogging feature?
Yes, our Blog is WordPress.
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by mingstar »

Is it safe to say that a successful migration means (1) lowered overall costs - presumably having virtual servers is cheaper than physical servers? and (2) easier maintenance/less time required for the BH admins?
As I said earlier
The primary reason for this migration is my concern about the long term reliability and sustainability of my machines. Should hardware ever fail, recovery is faster and easier in a virtual environment.
I love this site and how it continues to help people. It has helped me so very much. However, as LadyGeek and I have often commiserated, we often wake up with thoughts about "what would we do if Something Bad (R) happens to the hardware." I finally got to the point where the worry was costing me more than I wanted to pay. This move increases my cost but lets me wake up thinking about other things.

As for the idea that virtual servers are cheaper than physical servers, that's not the case. Virtual servers run on physical servers. Somebody bought those physical servers and has to pay staff and buy hardware to maintain them. Typical virtual server pricing pays for the hardware on which it runs in less than a year.

If your application need only a small portion of a physical server, as when running a simple web site with low to moderate traffic, you can save money by buying that small capacity as a small virtual server versus buying a physical machine and paying for the rack space and bandwidth in a colocation facility.

However, bogleheads.org is not a simple web site with low to moderate traffic. Its load demands significant resources and the virtual servers offered by most providers are not adequate for the task. As I mentioned in the previous post, the file and database server, in particular, needs a lot of RAM. That's the golden ticket in VPS hosting: it comes with a price.

The machines I bought a few years ago are still going strong. They're high capacity, bigger than the biggest physical machines offered by this hosting facility, they're high end and they're well built. They could last another decade ... but they might not, hence my move.

As we learn more, we will be constantly evaluating options but our current facility has both fair prices and excellent technical support. For example, while building this cluster, when I had questions I could get to a technically adept human in under thirty seconds. Without exception, they could understand my questions. That, by itself, is rare but, even better, they could usually provide an answer right away. If they couldn't get the answer immediately, they would quickly escalate to higher tiers of support. In one instance, I was trading e-mail with Tier 4 support in under thirty minutes. That is a precious commodity.
Just curious what part of bogleheads uses Wordpress - just the blogging feature?
Yes - the forum is phpBB, the wiki is MediaWiki, and the blog is Wordpress.

Larry
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Re: Site Migration - 2021-02-09 at 05:30 EST [Site offline]

Post by euphonious »

It probably doesn't matter much, but in case you weren't aware, the new IP for bogleheads.org (23.254.167.168) is on a couple blacklists.

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?ac ... n=toolpage

I only noticed this because I have a firewall rule that blocks IPs that query certain well known exploitable ports, and apparently that rule had added 23.254.167.168 to my own personal blacklist a couple years ago.

Most blacklists don't keep blocked IPs around for that long, and given that the IP appears clean on the majority of public blacklists, it's probably fine.

Just a heads up in case this somehow ends up being an issue.
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