So what failed exactly?

Free-Stater 101

Freedom Means Freedom!!!
Nuke Mod
Moderator
Staff Member
Just curious what you were trying to do and what broke ?
Nothing. Our old owner never updated the xenforo on here since the site was founded in 2019 and as a result we had to update through quiet a few editions to get it up to date.
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
We tested the upgrade process multiple times in a test environment, it worked every time. We tried to do it for real and had multiple failure points, mostly server side.
Details, gimme some more of the juicy details. :D :love::p

It has been years since I've had to upgrade anything on an actual honest to god pet type server, yay containerization, still though, I wanna hear all about MySQL version mismatches, the wrong version of the PHP runtime, missing libraries and all of that good shit.
I'd bet somehwere in all that there must be versions of system packages that were broken or missing or mismatched, too. :D

Ah, nostaliga.
 

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
The site was taken offline for an attempted upgrade. We had performed this process multiple times in a test environment that perfectly replicated the live environment. When we took the site down, we made a backup image of the site, copied said image over to the test environment, and began the upgrade process there. This time there was a hardware fault (Digital Ocean uses virtual hard drives, ours failed during the Linux upgrade) that forced us to abort the first attempt. After several reversions and reboots of the test environment we were able to get past that point, however further issues arose and our tech person had to go to work.

This morning we attempted to complete the upgrade, however once again we began getting error messages during the Linux upgrade portions of the process. I made the executive decision to abort the upgrade process. We will troubleshoot the issues we experienced, and once we are confident that we have a solid handle on them we'll try this again, hopefully successfully.
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
The site was taken offline for an attempted upgrade. We had performed this process multiple times in a test environment that perfectly replicated the live environment. When we took the site down, we made a backup image of the site, copied said image over to the test environment, and began the upgrade process there. This time there was a hardware fault (Digital Ocean uses virtual hard drives, ours failed during the Linux upgrade) that forced us to abort the first attempt. After several reversions and reboots of the test environment we were able to get past that point, however further issues arose and our tech person had to go to work.

This morning we attempted to complete the upgrade, however once again we began getting error messages during the Linux upgrade portions of the process. I made the executive decision to abort the upgrade process. We will troubleshoot the issues we experienced, and once we are confident that we have a solid handle on them we'll try this again, hopefully successfully.
So your test environment is virtual and the server itself is physical, or was there just some problem with the storage drivers for the VM?
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
...have you guys considered containerizing the site so you don't need to care about OS level issues?
I don't think XenForo supports docker-based deployment or has an official image.

You'd still need to upgrade MySQL and make sure it is a compatible version, and a bunch of other problems.
This shit ain't suitable for deployment as a microservice.
Also, whatever happens you'd still need to patch the container host OS and make sure there is storage.

Actually, PHP should have gone the way of the Dodo years ago, IMHO.
 

posh-goofiness

Well-known member
I don't think XenForo supports docker-based deployment or has an official image.

You'd still need to upgrade MySQL and make sure it is a compatible version, and a bunch of other problems.
This shit ain't suitable for deployment as a microservice.
Also, whatever happens you'd still need to patch the container host OS and make sure there is storage.

Actually, PHP should have gone the way of the Dodo years ago, IMHO.
Huh. I didn't know that. So, definitely no chance of running the site off a scratch container? That's pretty unfortunate.
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
Huh. I didn't know that. So, definitely no chance of running the site off a scratch container? That's pretty unfortunate.
I mean, you can probably try and use a php-fpm image as a base, but you will also need something in front of it to host the static crap and url mapping and passing off requests to PHP, then you will need to stuff all of the crap that makes up the actual xenforo into the container and have at least one more container running some compatible version of PHP with a volume that mounts secrets and config maps for XenForo, no idea how you do that with pure Docker btw, maybe you can use Swarm for it, Kubernetes ftw here.

So, unless you have some provider that gives you DBaaS then you will have to run a minimum of 3 conteinsrs, possibly more if redis and memcached are used.

And of course all of this will not be covered by your license so tough luck getting support. :)
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
Actually, PHP should have gone the way of the Dodo years ago, IMHO.

A good thing that the real world isn't run according to what random people think "should be" the case.

Now to the topic: if you are getting read or write errors from parts of the physical hard drive... then you probably want to move your setup to a new one sooner or later.
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
A good thing that the real world isn't run according to what random people think "should be" the case.
There are numerous language with much better performance and superior web frameworks.
Python is much cleaner and has excellent ORM.

Golang smashes every scripting language where performance is concerned, in fact if you look at benchmarks it, Java and C# dominate when you exclude some of the really weird hypster shit like attempts at making C++ web frameworks and stuff written in Rust.
Perl Home Page, it is just dated crap playing catchup, the only comparable functionality to stuff like rails and django is laravel, which did not impress me in any way, and the ORM is still meh and Python has consistently better performance.
No one is doing to PHP for any major projects anymore, legacy stuff like wordpress and drupal are keeping it on life support.
Does any major cloud provider let you use PHP to write lambdas?
Nope!
Does it have any usage outside of web development?
Nope!
Hell, it still struggles with simple shit like package managers and a REPL.
Oh, and you still need to stick something in front of php-fpm that speaks FastCGI.

Now to the topic: if you are getting read or write errors from parts of the physical hard drive... then you probably want to move your setup to a new one sooner or later.
Um, I thought @LordSunhawk said that they are using DO and the servers are virtual, so the "disk failure" sounds like some problem with the kernel modules they installed after the upgrade.

If we are on physical hardware then I sincerely hope there is a mirrored RAID or LVM.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
There are numerous language with much better performance and superior web frameworks.
Python is much cleaner and has excellent ORM.

Golang smashes every scripting language where performance is concerned, in fact if you look at benchmarks it, Java and C# dominate when you exclude some of the really weird hypster shit like attempts at making C++ web frameworks and stuff written in Rust.
Perl Home Page, it is just dated crap playing catchup, the only comparable functionality to stuff like rails and django is laravel, which did not impress me in any way, and the ORM is still meh and Python has consistently better performance.
No one is doing to PHP for any major projects anymore, legacy stuff like wordpress and drupal are keeping it on life support.
Does any major cloud provider let you use PHP to write lambdas?
Nope!
Does it have any usage outside of web development?
Nope!
Hell, it still struggles with simple shit like package managers and a REPL.
Oh, and you still need to stick something in front of php-fpm that speaks FastCGI.

Whatever. I'm not much interested in playing the "cool new language that everyone is using this month and will have forgotten by next year" game.
My PHP code does what it's meant to do, reliably and maintainably. It works, and if it breaks, I just fix it.
Essentially you are complaining that a spanner does not do the job of a screwdriver or a power-drill. Who ever said it was meant to?

And Java? Bleh! Java is an abomination that should never have been.

Oh by the way, if you want a solid example of a web server platform written in C?
Apache.

Um, I thought @LordSunhawk said that they are using DO and the servers are virtual, so the "disk failure" sounds like some problem with the kernel modules they installed after the upgrade.

If we are on physical hardware then I sincerely hope there is a mirrored RAID or LVM.

All "virtual" systems actually run on real hardware somewhere. Adding more things that can go wrong does not make things safer.
 

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
Whatever. I'm not much interested in playing the "cool new language that everyone is using this month and will have forgotten by next year" game.
My PHP code does what it's meant to do, reliably and maintainably. It works, and if it breaks, I just fix it.
Essentially you are complaining that a spanner does not do the job of a screwdriver or a power-drill. Who ever said it was meant to?
That still doesn't make it a good language, or one that has the proper features a modern language should.
Even Java has a bunch of build and dependency management tools.

Also, I love how you are calling the language that powers most containerization-related software, most of Hashi's stack and is google's official internal language and the top language used in AI/ML/Data Science and that has stuff like the yum written in it respectively "cool new language that everyone is using this month and will have forgotten by next year"
Go, Python and Java are very well established languages, they most certainly are not hype.

Rust is.
C++ for outright web development is.

And Java? Bleh! Java is an abomination that should never have been.
Oh, it is ugly, but it has improved over the years.

Oh by the way, if you want a solid example of a web server platform written in C?
Apache.
yeah, somebody is not seeing the difference between a framework for web development and a static webserver here...

All "virtual" systems actually run on real hardware somewhere. Adding more things that can go wrong does not make things safer.
No shit, Sherlock, and that includes live or relatively fast VM migration to healthy hardware, monitoring and 24/7 support for the underlying hardware and things like disks living on redundant network storage arrays with mirroring and snapshots, higher quality components like ECC ram that permits potential failures in advance, you have a failure rate of oh 0.001% for stuff like EBS on Amazon, for instance.

of course if your workload is that critical you should have regular snapshots, or maybe stay in the modern world and keep your shit in proper object storage, which can have 99.999999999% durability, and in a managed database solution with replication.

The cloud isn't somebody else's computer, it is somebody else's redundant datacenters and 24/7 support.
 

posh-goofiness

Well-known member

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
The "market share" IMHO is for legacy applications like Drupal and Wordpress, PHPbb and various other ancient stuff.
Also, facebook is still stuck on it.

Believe me, I wish PHP wasn't a relevant language anymore. But the numbers don't lie on this one. It might be ugly but it's definitely got the market share.
Haven't heard of anyone using PHP for a new application or project in years, tbh.
Mostly it is Java, C#, Golang, Python and Node.js.

I'd still prefer... literally anything else over Java. If I'm forced into using a JVM I'd rather write in Scala than in Java.
:sick:

I mean, Groovy ain't that bad, and Kotlin looks decent.

Scala is pretty ugly, but for a functional language it is actually readable, I mean, that class of languages has such gems as Erlang and Lisp.
 

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