Savannah Hackers, After being stalled for a while due to Life, The Universe, and Everything, work picked back up again on upgrading the OS hosting the web UI frontend0. To catch up on the happenings let me refresh the events.
We asked the FSF admins to clone the VM image of frontend0 creating frontend1 as a fork of it so that we could safely work on the upgrade off to the side in parallel with but not affecting the running production system frontend0. Then we upgraded frontend1's Trisquel OS from Belenos 7 to the latest release Trisquel Flidas 8. That OS upgrade brings in many significant upgrades including an upgrade from PHP 5 to PHP 7. And also introduces systemd with another collection of significant changes. Ineiev did the majority of the real work in making the web UI upgrade possible by working through the PHP code and making upgrades needed for the PHP 7 changes. That work made this upgrade possible! I think the new system is ready to go. It has actually been in this state for some time but did not wan to make the switch until it would happen at a time I would be available to monitor it and react to any problem reports. That time has now arrived. I have switched the DNS from the old frontend0 to the new frontend1. If people would be so kind as to keep an eye on the web interface and report any breakage that would be most appreciated. Of course this has no effect at all on the rest of the version control backend services. Except pessimist me knows that there will almost certainly be something we missed that will be broken and need to be fixed in the interaction between the systems. A small block diagram type design change was made with this upgrade. The web UI saves uploaded file attachments. Previously this was locally stored on the frontend0. This has been changed to be shared on NFS in the vcs partition where multiple frontend{0,1,n} systems can share it. Since there is no longer any saved local state local to the web UI system it means we can switch between frontend systems as needed without worry as to the local file state. It would also mean that we could scale-out with multiple load balancing frontend systems if that were needed too. In any case local saved attachments, the only local saved state, is now on the shared NFS storage. Now it is time to look at upgrades for the other systems. Each as its own unique challenges. :-) Bob
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