I have just spent almost the entire weekend trying to upgrade the One Ring to use phpBB3. What a nightmare!
The new forum software provides a very good conversion utility that seems to work extremely well, except for one fatal flaw – it is so memory and cpu-intensive that it would drag our server’s performance down to a snail pace. So naturally our hosting company refused to let me do it. After several email exchanges, in which they completely failed to understand what I was talking about (despite giving them the actual configuration settings they need for their apache servers), I gave up and decided to download everything to my laptop and run the conversion there.
Yes, my Toshiba laptop can handle this, when their gazillion terrabyte servers can’t!
So, painfully extracting the data 2MB at a time table by table, I managed to import it onto my laptop and run the conversion process. It took a while, but it worked flawlessly. So far so good!
Uploading it back to the website again in small chunks, I managed to import it into the database without any hiccups. Except that the system stubbornly decided it would just not work. The theory was fine: the data was in there, all users, posts and messages were uploaded, but the website just completely failed to work. After doing this for 12 hours on the trot (not to mention the 16 hours over the past week backup up files and databases and previous installation attempts), I’d had enough.
Besides, I had to go out to dinner – my 22nd wedding anniversary. It was a wonderful dinner and my wife looked stunning, but she kept telling me I seemed “a bit distracted”. No kidding darling.
And then at about 2 in the morning I woke up with a horrendous headache and was sick as a dog. I slept fitfully until 1:30pm when I finally dragged my sorry butt out of bed in search of coffee.
While sitting there feeling like crap, I had a thought about what the problem with the site was. I needed to flush the cache (I think the word ‘flush’ might have triggered the thought), so I found the cache and deleted it and lo! the site came back to life. A quick recalc of some stats and a check of the forum’s permissions and it seemed to be all working. So hopefully, I managed to actually do what I set out to do this weekend.
The big tasks are still ahead of me, but at least the site is safe and a bit more secure from hackers.
Now I just need my stomach to settle a bit.
Happy anniversary brother!
22 years, that is really awesome!! 🙂
Hope you feel better soon…don’t kill yourself on the website and just work on it at a reasonable pace and take it slow if need be, health is more important.
22 years Sharon should be up for sainthood. Seriously mate congradulations.
Thanks guys, much appreciated. I seem to be cursed when it comes to having a nice meal – I attempted to make good last weekend’s disaster by cooking a special meal for my family – lightly crumbed pan fried chicken breast fillets on a bed of pesto and balsamic vinegar, with baby spinach leaves, croutons and sun dried tomatoes. I made the pesto and croutons myself, and even julliened the carrots.
Then ended up choking on my first mouthful. It got stuck in my throat and I had to go and, erm, remove it somehow.
Damn!
“Then ended up choking on my first mouthful”
You must chew my friend, then swallow. 🙂
I always end up biting myself when I get excited by food, but I do chew. LOL
Thanks for the advice Dave – I’ll chew on it for a while!