CLOK Server Upgrade January 25, 2016

[Jirato]

We will be performing an operating system upgrade (CentOS 5 to CentOS 6) on the server in which CLOK is running on January 25th. Due to the nature of this upgrade, CLOK will be unavailable for an extended period of time.

Our tentative plans are to bring the server offline at 5pm eastern (3pm mountain). The game itself will be brought down early to ensure that everything is backed up properly and documented for restoration when the server upgrade is completed.

So here's what we're looking at:

January 25, 2016, 9AM Eastern / 7AM Mountain: CLOK MUD offline, 100% backup of MUD server files and related SQL databases.
January 25, 2016, 5PM Eastern / 3PM Mountain: Server placed in maintenance mode, CLOK BBS and Wiki Offline.
January 25, 2016 7PM Eastern / 5PM Mountain: Estimated completion time for OS upgrade, CLOK BBS and Wiki Online.
January 25, 2016 8PM Eastern / 6PM Mountain: Estimated restoration of CLOK MUD application, CLOK MUD online.

[ydia]

Hope it all goes smoothely.

[Jirato]

I completely forgot about this. Whoops. Thanks Lassyn for reminding me.

The game is shutting down now. I will post to Facebook and Twitter when it will be back up.

[Jirato]

Note that the CLOK teamtalk server will also be offline during the upgrade process.

[Jirato]

We're up!

It's been a fun night.

• Server gets brought offline, moved to the provider's workshop for upgrade
• They remove the old hard drive and put in a clean one, installing CentOS 6.7 from scratch
• They slave the old hard drive to the system and migrate all the user accounts created through cPanel (about 1/3rd of the accounts on the server)
• They tell me they're done and to check everything is working before they put it back on the rack.
• I tell them I'm missing all my non-cPanel accounts, as well as two important directories outside of user profiles (hint: One of them is /mud)
• They restore the files, but during the restoration all the file permissions get reset and we start seeing Error 500 Internal Server Error on the websites.
• They fix file permissions for the CLOK website and my personal website, but file permissions for the non-cPanel accounts have to be fixed manually.
• We decide to go ahead and create cPanel accounts for all my service accounts so that we don't run into this issue in the future.
• Finaly, with all the accounts made, they take the server back and put it on the rack.
• I Install tmux, because I refuse to use the server without it.
• I Install emacs, because I refuse to use the server without it.
• I Install htop because I'm lazy
• I Install Python 2.7 along side the default Python 2.6 which is required for the package manager the server uses
• I Install the pip package manager for Python 2.7
• I use pip to install Twisted network application framework for Python
• I use pip to install MySQL for Python
• I use pip to install simplejson
• Start up the server and make sure nothing exploded
• Open it to players

Now, I've still got a lot of other stuff to do. But the important thing is, you guys can play.

[Tamsin]

Yay~ Go Jirato!