Howdy all,

When life gives you Coroaviruses, make Coronavirusade, or something...actually, probably don't do that.

What I mean to say is that over the past two months I have used some of the extra time I've had available to complete a project which long overdue: To upgrade the underlying infrastructure that the PAFOA website/forum run on to more modern technologies.

So far these upgrades have been applied to all of our infrastructure except the forum itself, but that upgrade is planned for late next week.

When will the downtime happen?

Assuming nothing changes, the forum will be taken down the morning of Thursday, May 28th, and remain down for at least a few hours while backups are made, transferred to the new infrastructure, brought online, and tested. My goal is to have the forum back online on the new infrastructure by "end of day" so that it is back online around dinner time when people use it most. Assuming everything goes as planned, it could be back online even earlier.

If for any reason this migration cannot be done on Thursday, the same plan will be performed on Friday, May 29th instead and everyone will be updated.

Either way, this will give me the entire weekend and Monday to be on-call to address any unexpected issues that crop up along the way.

What will I see during the downtime?

When the downtime starts, you will see the forum software with a message saying that the forum is undergoing maintenance. Once the forum has been moved to the new infrastructure, you will begin instead to see a blank white page indicating that the forum is undergoing maintenance while I do final testing of the forum to ensure it is ready to open it back up.

Once we are back online, I will be posting a thread to allow everyone to report any bugs/problems/other issues that people find.

What will change about the forum after the upgrade?

Ultimately the changes being made are mostly below the surface with regards to how we build, deploy, and update the forum software that should make the forum significantly more reliable and easier to manage on my end, but there are two things that should improve your experience:


  1. The forum will now be served over SSL and all traffic will be encrypted. This is extremely long over due, and for that I apologize.
  2. The forum will now autoscale servers up and down to match increasing/decreasing traffic. This should allow us to scale up capacity during busy times to keep the forum fast, and scale down capacity during slow times to save PAFOA money.


What happens if something goes wrong?

I will flee to an undisclosed island location and live the rest of my life under an assumed identity selling trinkets to beach tourists while wearing a very fake mustache.