Hi all,
It took a bit longer than expected, but I'm happy to inform you that the
Lazarus services are back online.
For those interested in why it took longer, I'll explain at the end of
the message.
Marc
On 24-12-2021 08:30, Marc Weustink wrote:
Hi,
On Monday 27 December 9.00 CET (8.00 GMT) the Lazarus server will be
down for maintenance. This affects the following services:
* Lazarus website
* Lazarus mailinglists
* Lazarus online package manager
* Lazarus and FreePascal forum
Thanks,
Marc
The story....
The server was running Ubuntu 16 LTR, so it's support ended on April
this year. An attempt at that time failed since Ubuntu decided to switch
to systemd-resolve which resulted in a server not even able to resolve
its own name, let alone other hosts. When Googling about it, you learn
that it doesn't work, it's a half backed solution, not a full DNS etc.
At that time it became clear that I wouldn't be able to solve that in an
evening. Luckily I could try this on a cloned server (we had to rent for
another issue) so I parked the upgrade till I could spend a full day.
Yesterday I found the "correct" solution to this which appeared to work.
So I continued to upgrade to Ubuntu 18 and finally to Ubuntu 20 LTR.
Everything seemed to work until I enabled the mailserver. It couldn't
resolve any mailserver for a given domain.
What the f.. 'host -t mx freepascal.org' resolves, why can't postfix
resolve it. Again after some Googling, postfix needs a /etc/resolf.conf.
However one step of the DNS solution was to remove the /etc/resolf.conf
symlink, so I tried to restore the original link to some systemd-resolve
generated one. This one pointed to their internal resolver. Still no
luck since I hadn't configured systemd-resolve which DNS itself should
use. After doing so, the generated resolf.conf became empty ?????
After more Googling I found that systemd-resolve generates another conf
where you also can link to. No clue why there have to exist another
version, but this one works.
So this part of the server upgrade got finished around 14:00. The
Lazarus mailing list and main website were back online.
Another wish we had was to change the database backend of the forum. It
appeared over time that when doing a search on the database, mysql
blocks updates, so browsing the forum becomes unresponsive. The current
version of SMF supports different databases so we decided to go for
PostgreSQL (I'm using them at work for years now).
Migrating MySql data to PostgreSQL seemed easy with pgLoader. The
documentation about is was initially a bit sparse, but I could start a
conversion with some commandline options. Unfortunately it got killed
after 15 mins of import. After two more attempts it became clear, out of
memory :(
Reducing the memory requirements was a build time option so I didn't
want to go that way. Another solution was to convert only a few tables
at a time. That required however a configuration file which has more
options than the command line. Most of the examples I found on the web
failed, since they lack the semi colon at the end if the configuration.
So the parser barfs with some abracadabra, initially not giving a clue.
Fast forward, on 18:00 all but the messages table were converted. On
22:00 the messages table was converted using 9 parts. Then I realized
that I didn't have a php-pgsql driver installed. After doing so, I
discovered that the Lazarus main site also showed the forum maintenance
message ???
Those sites are running on two different virtual servers. How can the
contents of an index.php of one site have influence on the index.php of
another site. What did go wrong when I installed the driver ???
After an hour investigating I decided to enable the forum first and
investigate the issue later.
Poof.... the forum results in a bunch of errors. What we didn't think of
when switching backend, is that we use SMF (which is PostgreSQL capable)
and TinyPortal (TP) to have the menus at the sides. And TP is full of
MySQL only statements. Luckily there is someone who created all those
missing functions for SMF and I created them on the database. After
adjusting some TP php files (PostgreSQL requires a true boolean and not
some integer <> 0), the forum started without errors. But it didn't show
any boards. So there is still something wrong under the hood.
Meanwhile it was 24:00 and I decided to continue using MySQL and called
it a day.
This morning I reverted my TP changes and put the MySQL database back
online.
To be continued...
Marc
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