Textpattern project server repave - winter 2023

gaekwad · 2023-12-02 16:48:04

Hi, everyone. I’m the Textpattern project web server grease monkey. I bring news of upcoming changes to our server setup.

Please note: this affects the Textpattern project web server presence, and not your own Textpattern instance. These are two separate things.

Our network of sites includes: the Textpattern ‘main’ .com site, this Textpattern user forum, the Textpattern user docs, the plugins site (in beta), the themes site (in pre-alpha), Textpattern design patterns, the legacy Textpattern RPC, TXP Mag, and a handful of redirect domains for legacy stuff.

Some of our sites are misbehaving in unpredictable ways, and rather than spend half a day investigating it, it’s more efficient for me to spin up a new server and relocate.

Our hosting provider – DigitalOcean – have graciously renewed our hosting credit for the next 12 months, so I have a great opportunity to spend some of the dark nights of winter 2023 migrating our sites to fresh servers.

This will be a process that takes some time, because I want to do it right and work in the lessons learned from previous server repave projects. There are two servers, both are build and ready to accept websites. The technical details for firewalls / filters are:

turtle.textpattern.net (159.65.240.144 & 2604:a880:800:10::ba6:9001)
triton.textpattern.net (137.184.234.120 & 2604:a880:4:1d0::10d:c000)

Both servers will be providing outgoing mail via SMTP. Given the reputation of the IP range & noisy neighbours, there are some issues with the above IP addresses on email blocklists. This is being resolved with each blocklist provider.

The forum is the biggest sender of email, given that a reply on a topic might trigger double-figures of emails to be sent to subscribed users. To that end, the forum will be the last site to move, and only when the blocklists are ‘all clear’ so there’s minimal turbulence. I expect there to be a bit of warming up time before we’re in the good lists, but I’ll do my very best to maintain a reputable mail server presence.

(It should be said that Apple get snippy whenever we change servers, and there may be some disruption to icloud.com email addresses. Again, I will mitigate this as far as I can. I don’t have Tim Apple on speed dial, we had a falling out over the Touch Bar era of MacBooks and it’s…complicated.)

The next post will be used to capture details on what’s happening, and when.

Please leave comments & questions below. Thank you.

gaekwad · 2023-12-02 16:48:11

R&D / head scratching / frustrating

Dec 12 2023 – present time

docs.textpattern.com (troubleshooting auto-rebuild stuff)

Done

Dec 13 2023

Migrated:

forum.textpattern.com

Dec 08 2023

Migrated:

Dec 06 2023

Migrated:

Dec 05 2023

Migrated:

Last edited by gaekwad (2023-12-13 13:58:50)

gaekwad · 2024-02-24 20:03:51

All done. Phew.

jakob · 2024-02-25 08:33:15

Big thanks Pete! I suspect few of us have a good idea of how much work is actually involved.

Bloke · 2024-02-25 10:09:42

No small feat. Wow. Thank you so much.

gaekwad · 2024-02-25 15:40:41

Thanks, jakob & Bloke.

The build guide I wrote started off as a single text file, then went into a Scrivener document, then went into a pile of Markdown documents, and according to the Git history it has had 6,000+ commits since August 2017. I dread to think about the time investment in it, suffice to say it’s the most rewarding hobby I’ve ever had!

bici · 2024-02-25 23:07:13

awesome work!
( seems to he a header section missing on this plugins.textpattern.com domain

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#1 2023-12-02 16:48:04