Milsurps Site Changes (November 2016)

Hello everyone .. :)

First the bad news…. :(

The current computer hardware operating our Milsurps.Com site is 10 years old and with over 28,000 members connecting worldwide, it’s starting to really show its age.

Now, the good news…. :dancingbanana:

With the outstanding financial support in the past few years from so many Contributing Members (click here), we’ve committed your donations to upgrading the system to a computer that’s over three times as powerful and increasing our 2 Gigabyte hard disk storage to 2,000 Gigabytes, which should last us another 10 years, or more.

At the same time, we’ve moved our U.S. hosting site location from Texas to a new data centre in Georgia, which should provide members with higher bandwidth performance, when the hardware is under a lot of load from many users.

The new hardware is already running at the new site and we’re currently testing to ensure that when we cut-over live, that except for members seeing better performance, the change should be transparent.

However, it does mean that when we do the actual software move of our live database, the site may be down for an hour or so, but we’ll try to give our active members sufficient notice of when that’s going to happen. Our current thinking is that it may be sometime in the next few weeks.

Thank you for your ongoing support. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug

What ever you do Doug, don't let it be as bad as Gunboards..........that's getting past a joke.

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Originally Posted by muffett.2008

What ever you do Doug, don't let it be as bad as Gunboards..........that's getting past a joke.

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For those that aren't familiar with some of the background of recent Gunboards activities, here's a thread from about 6 months ago with more details.

Gunboards sold to VerticalScope Inc. (Toronto)

For clarity, although we've been approached by several different organizations over the last few years wishing to purchase this site, we have no interest in selling it at any price. ;)

We started this site 10 years ago with a view that as long as it could be a self sustaining not-for-profit environment supported by a modicum of contributing members, it will remain as a site run by collectors, for the benefit of collectors, absent of any other political agenda. We also want it to be a site where members can be as worry free as possible, about their accounts being hacked or having their own computers infected by malicious viruses.

For those of you who haven't read this help thread, perhaps now is a good time.. :thup:

How safe from viruses and hackers am I when using the Milsurps.Com web site? (click here)

Also, if at anytime you're logged on and would like piece of mind to check to ensure our site is free of any known malware, SPAM, viruses, or its blacklisting status, then click on this link and save it as a bookmark in your web browser for future use:

Sucuri Verified Website - Milsurps.com (click here)

This link and other site security and performance checks, are also located under the Members Only tabbed drop down box located at the top of the forum.

Note: If (or when) we get too old to maintain this site, we'll ensure it's passed onto the next generation of collectors to maintain its legacy and positive culture. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug (and Deb)

Looking forward to the upgrade Doug! Many thanks to you and all the great folks behind the tech certain making this all possible ;)

This was the first forum I had ever paid money to be member - not because I needed to view stuff, but because it was so great in content, knowledge and of course the helpful, nice and great members. And I never had regret giving money for it, I am in fact really confident that it was well used.

Doug, you can be really proud of what you not only created, but also what you lead so great. Thank you - also to Deb!

Edit: what a coincidence that this is also my 1000th post here...

Update: We are going to begin part of our site move this coming Wednesday morning, November 23rd, at about 6:00 am EST (Eastern Standard Time) ... :thup:

As a result, we anticipate the web site may be off-line and unavailable for about an hour.

This first part of this upgrade will entail moving the database of all threads, posts and images etc., to reside on the new hardware (and site), while the remainder of the program code that uses the database, will still reside on the old hardware (and old site).

Members should see no difference. In fact, it might even be FASTER as the old server will no longer need to operate both the database AND web server on the same hardware. :clap:

Once we have ensured there are no adverse side effects to moving the database, we'll schedule another brief outage at a later date/time and move the balance of the code and other files over to the new server .

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop .. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug

am happy the money donated is put to great use keep up the great work

Cool Beans !!!

Update: The move of our milsurps database ONLY to the new server (and geographic site), was completed successfully between 6:00 am and 6:30 am this morning. :super:

The rest of the move of remaining files and the addition of some new site security features (more to follow on this) will occur during the next week.

This latter activity should be transparent to members and there should be no requirement to take the entire site off-line to accomplish this.

In the next while, the tech support team just need to go through all the settings one last time to make sure they didn't miss anything and then change the DNS over to point to the new site IP address.

This latter step often produces some downtime during these kinds of moves for up to 24 hours, but by keeping BOTH servers running at the same time and with both of them pointing to the new database, it doesn't matter if a member is on the old web server or the new web server, as the data is all going to the right place.

As the IP change propagates throughout the whole Internet, our members will ALL be pointed to the new server within a day or so. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug

Thank you very much Badger for the updates and the continual improvements to the site along with yours and the teams on going attendance to the requirements of what I believe to be the fore most site for information, helpfulness and generally top membership of personnel that share a common interest in all things military though not forgetting those with the technical and hands on experience that also contribute to help numbies like myself get along with the old girls when they act up.
Even though the world we knew (moderately old folks like myself) moves towards the faceless electronic age and a dog eat dog world where at times there is no rhyme or reason it is pretty cool to find here that the site offers respect for all and a helpful hand in understanding how to rectify a problem or the missing information about their rifle or military surplus gear.
One of the few best kept secrets of the electronic age..........:super::cheers:

I am unable to create a thread for a discussion. is the upgrade affecting the ability to create a thread?

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Originally Posted by Nich13

I am unable to create a thread for a discussion. is the upgrade affecting the ability to create a thread?

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There are many threads created by members since the time of your post, so that's not a problem. Obviously, since you replied and created a post in this thread successfully, that can't be your issue. Without clearer information as to exactly what you're trying to do, I'm afraid I can't help you much. :confused:

However, I suspect your issue is that your are attempting to respond to or create a thread in a forum that is set to Read Only status. :thup:

Some new members fail to read the "stickies" or headers in forums that are usually labeled Read Me First

For example, if you're trying to use the Quartermaster Stores classifieds ad area, there's a link at the top of the forum that says....

**** How to Use Classifieds System - PLEASE READ FIRST ! ****

Check the "stickies" for the forum you're attempting to create a thread in and see if that solves your problem. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug

Final Update: As of yesterday, we are now operating completely from our new web server located in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. :dancingbanana:

Considering we transitioned an incredibly complex operating system environment from a 10 year old hardware platform, over to a state of the art computer server and associated modern updated operating system, the amount of upheaval and issues were relatively minor. Our tech support person did a fabulous job doing this, while still being able to maintain ongoing availability for members to be able to use the site. Thank you Paul ... :clap:

The new server is performing incredibly well and exceptionally fast under load. Everything that used to operate on the old server, now appears to be functioning correctly on the new server, with the exception of a feature called Autolinking. Essentially that’s the feature you used to see where a term (or person’s name) such as or linseed oil would generate a pop-up window with a definition as to the meaning of the term. Unfortunately, when we activate that feature on the new Intel Xeon E5-2620 Dual CPU server and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (64-Bit) operating system, it promptly blows up the site and takes it down.

So, we’ve left it disabled for now, while tech support continues to trouble shoot why this is happening and we may have to see if the developer of the product can help us out. Just a note ... in the next week or so and depending upon when you login, you may find the odd time where the site looks like it's completely gone bonkers and not functioning correctly, perhaps displaying gobbly-gook instead of a proper web page. Don't panic.. it's most likely caused by tech support trouble shooting the above issue with auto-linking and to do so, they need to test on the live site. Just browse other sites for a while and come back later to check if things are back to normal. Please accept our apologies for the interruption if this should happen to you. :thup:

The next steps are to add new capabilities to the site by adding DKIM (for email) and SSL (for data encryption), both designed to help provide additional security for our members. By the way, to our knowledge, neither of these technologies are used by any other gun sites on the Internet. All that we’ve looked are pretty much open and expose their members to hackers, malware, adware, trojans and other virus type activities.

Given the recent hacking that occurred on Gunboards and at least two other gun related web sites, we felt it was important to implement these functions, so all our members can feel secure and confident about the safety of their personal information and identity when publicly posting here.

Once we have these new features up and running, we’ll update everyone again, explaining in more detail what they do and how they work to protect our members.

Thanks for your patience while this upgrade process was in process…. :cheers:

Regards,
Doug

Edit Update: As you can tell from the above dynamic pop-up links, we now have the popular software feature called Autolinking, fixed and operating once again on our new server. :super: