7 p.m. on Saturday 28th December 2024

This A progress report on the engineering work I have been doing on the "Great Western Coffee Shop" forum which has been tuning on my servers for the last 18 years.  Intended as an 18 week project when it was set up in 2007, it is overdue for upgrade - it is looking very dated, doesn't fit well on the small screens people use on their phones these days, and uses the old protocols which set off all sorts of alarm bells in virus checkers.  So there was a lot to be done!  I closed the door in the early hours, completed a download (67Gbytes), updated the status page at http://status.firstgreatwestern.info for any members who had missed the alerts that had been going out for that week.

* I have moved the domain name (what the site is called) to a new, more modern server that should be good for the next 5 years. It has more capacity (as the Coffee Shop has grown) and responds to the newer https protocol. It's also shared with other more recent domain names so we can move on no manner who is running our trains.

* The old forum software is so old it cannot be easily upgraded, and needs to run on an older version of underlying software, so I have left it where it was.  And I have set up the modern server as a proxy server, facing the internet and acting as gatekeeper for the more mature server.  I have used a balancer, so should we grow in the future or add resource greedy code (there are various temptations!) I can simply add another server. Rather like a doctor's surgery with a single receptionist adding another doctor.  Again, this should be good for five years.

The forum software by far the most complex and oldest application on the server, and also the one that gets far and away more accessed on our server that everything else on there put together.  So this re-engineering has been the bit task that I allowed 48 hours for - delighted to have go to where I am after 16 hours of work.

The following remain to be done over the next few days - the more major stuff starting at dawn tomorrow. No need to stop the service - the big structural change has happened and your posts are safe and into our backup systems again

1. The LIKE system does not like (!) the new front and back room setup - I didn't write it with that in mind and it needs fixing.  There are issues with smiley faces too, and the post editor

2. The document mirror (2000 transport industry .pdfs totalling 10Gb needs a lick of paint to make it work again. It's vital stuff but not in particularly frequent use

3. There are odd bugs from the move, such as setting up your avatar

4. The forum support pages and indexes all need relinking, adjusting and testing. Lots of stuff there - maps, fare manuals, usage statistics and probably a dozen other things I will think of in the morning, and there will be an ongoing debugging and cleaning up process

5. Over coming months and throughout 2025, you'll see extra facilities added to the Coffee Shop, and the software becoming far more phone friendly.  We have grown this year - from around 800 to 900 posts a month last winter to over 1500 posts a month in the last quarter so we must be doing something right (or the railways something wrong, which is another story)