The time has come for us to finally migrate to our new home! This is currently scheduled for Tuesday, 11/21, at 8 AM. Expected downtime is 1-3 Hours.

Downtime Begins: Tuesday, November 21 @ 8:00 AM
Estimated Duration: 1-3 Hours

Unlike our previous migrations, our new server is already set up and our Host and I have been working on it for the past week getting it ready for the final data migration. The time it takes to actually export/import our database from one server to another is ~30ish minutes.

Once the data is transferred and I can verify everything is in working order, we will switch the DNS server over to the new server. While this is an instantaneous process, it can take up to 24-48 hours for the DNS change to propagate locally and throughout the world's network hubs/IPSs. However, there is a way to bypass this manually by editing your hosts file (on Windows) or something similar on other operating systems. This directly tells your device to go to our new server's address instead of relying on DNS. We will provide more information on this once the new server is live.

Lastly, regarding performance, the new server feels really good. Obviously, there's no real traffic on it at this point, but from my testing, things were moving very quickly and smoothly. We've upgraded versions of our database to newer versions and we have moved from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2. We also moved from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 for our server. I tried checking through everything that I could for errors and fixed what I could find. I focused only on fatal errors, as they break things. There are probably literally 100,000 warnings that I will have to sift through moving forward, but the site can operate just fine under warnings lol.

During the downtime, we will post updates via our official Discord channel and Facebook page.

I know it's only 1-3 hours but any chance of tacking on one more day to the fest? Or would that interrupt too much the plans moving into the Black Friday stuff?

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=107477&page=1#2 Author: Savynn Time Posted: 11/20/2023 at 9:53 PM I know it's only 1-3 hours but any chance of tacking on one more day to the fest? Or would that interrupt too much the plans moving into the Black Friday stuff?

There are no plans to extend the Festival at this point. But we will see how it goes tomorrow.

When will we be getting our things from making our pet designs, will we have time to craft new pets after we finally get it???

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=107477&page=1#4 Author: CasmereSphynx Time Posted: 11/20/2023 at 9:57 PM When will we be getting our things from making our pet designs, will we have time to craft new pets after we finally get it???

I will try and get those handed out as soon as I can. I just haven't had any spare time for the past 1-2 weeks.

I imagine to nobody's surprise lol... But that took much longer than expected. I HAD everything nicely planned out... but the technician we got assigned to early this morning kind of took us on a path that was not planned. This caused everything to take like 3x longer than it should have and, in the end, it wasn't even done right. I then was 'on hold' for an additional 4 hours waiting for said technician to fix everything. Finally, as the end of their high tier crew shift was nearing an end, I 'demanded' to have our ticket switched to a new technician. This worked and the new technician actually understood everything that we needed. They fixed the first technician's blunder and then properly did what had to be done (in about 90 minutes, which is why my initial estimate was 1-3 Hours).

At this point, we were on the new server and everything was almost entirely intact, with exception to emails. Our new server was not sending out emails. Again, I reached out to support and got stuck with someone refusing to help lol... We literally went back and forth for an hour before finally they essentially hung up. They wanted me to wait 24-48 hours for the issue to resolve itself when I knew that was not the issue. I then tried a few more things to resolve the issue on my own before reaching out to support again. This time, I got another technician who was competent and they quickly diagnosed and resolved the issue. A few more things had to be adjusted on my end and then were good to go. And here we are, ~12 hours behind schedule. Oh well. I tried lol. =(

In the future, I will literally request the competent technicians by name when I need something important worked on lol... Sheesh.

Anyway, we're here now. There will be various issues in the code that I will have to fix one-by-one as they pop up due to us now being in a new version of PHP. Some of the old code written in the past is no longer valid. Until someone does a thing and trips up on something invalid, I don't know to fix it. So I will be monitoring the error log very closely over the next few week and will clean up every error I see. If you run into something that breaks, just post in the Bug Report Forum and I will fix it ASAP. Thank you.

That sounds like such a frustrating process! I can't imagine having the patience to deal with all of that. Hope you have some time to rest now! (:

Really appreciate all the effort and time put into this though!
Thank you <3

Ugh, that stinks, Krin. Make sure to get some relaxation and destress from that ordeal.

Thank You for all your hard work; it is sad and frustrating that you got stuck with someone who handled the move in such an incompetent manner but saved by someone who actually understood what you needed.

One would think that, for a supposedly skilled technician, the request to move data to a new server is not that complicated a concept to grasp.
Anyways..I am sure you are relieved that this headache is over with. :)