E2 Emergency Infrastructure Update - May 12, 2019

Hello gentle noders. E2 is in a bit of a pickle; it's not a bad one, but it's one that will require a bit of patience. I've been busy with life and have tried a few times to update the E2 platform. Wheezy (our current platform) has fallen out of Long-Term Support and so the current deployment strategies will fail if we end up being forced to redeploy in the next few weeks. One of the machine's we're running on has a dying piece of infrastructure, so we're in a degraded state, and I'm not sure it's going to work after a reboot.

I've just about finished preparing the update to move to Bionic, and once that is in place, the service will be updating through a series of restarts and re-evaluations. The issue here is that I haven't tested things as thoroughly as possible. There is some basic stuff that I'm sure works: posting, user signup, chat, messages, voting, etc. We have a long-standing software quality issue on the site in that large platform changes kind of rely on the users to catch errors. You guys have always been great about it, even though I'd prefer that we have an early warning system to catch those issues.

As a part of this upgrade, we're getting more modern instance types which will allow us to save some cash eventually on the costs. There's going to be a second round of tweaks to move things to mysql-5.7, which is going to involve a deeper application surgery. We can put that off for some time, but not forever. I'll post something else whenever that goes in.

E2 is alive and well both as a business and as a website. The servers are just a little sick, so the doctor is in.

--Jay

For those of us who may have glazed eyes and a bit of a headache from reading Sir jaybonci's excellent geekspeak report above, let me attempt a summarizing translation.

A number of major and necessary under-the-hood changes might cause Everything2 to burp and fart a bit in the near future, although the basic stuff should be OK. We can help Jay out by watching for problems and reporting them, as we have in the past.

One big thing is the operating system (Debian) that runs on the computers that serve E2 to us (servers). After some years, the OS has a major update and that time has come. Jay is changing us from the "Wheezy" version to "Bionic". The update is likely to cause problems, but will bring the advantages of the new version, increase efficiency, and may reduce the cost of delivering E2 to the world.

After that, Jay will do some magic on the database, which will take a lot of work, but is not so urgent.

This is my interpretation and offered as a public service. It may be wrong in whole or part and entirely unnecessary.  Any error or omission is my bad.