So this morning around 8 am I started working on upgrading us to Xenforo 2.3. Xenforo 2.3 is a MAJOR upgrade that fixes a bunch of things and has been streamlined to run faster, it also contains a number of security fixed.
I backed up SatelliteGuys and at 10 AM I backed up the database. I then started to do the upgrade.
Mistake Number 1 - I forgot to do a Snapshot.
One of our custom written (nightly database backup) add ons that I was made for us many years ago caused an issue and corrupted everything. It was so bad that for some reason Cpanel and WHM stopped working even though this update does not go through Cpanel.
I was quickly able to get Cpanel and WHM back online but could not get the site back online even with the database and files backup I did this morning. So I had to do a restore using Jetbackup which is our main backup software. What this did was blew out all of SatelliteGuys so that everything was restored fresh.
So for the next 3 hours I had to restore from a backup. Once that backup was done I went in and removed the custom written nightly database backup addon. I then did a snapshot just in case...
Once that was done the old SatelliteGuys was back online... I then once again started the upgrade to 2.3. This time is had no problems upgrading to 2.3.
Then logged into the admin control panel.and was getting errors. I researched things and found that EXEC must be turned on in PHP. And the best couse of action would be to turn it on and do the upgade again.
So I figured the easiest way to do this was revert the snap shot.
I did that and then... Houston we have a problem. The server wouldn't come back online. I could not SSH into it and none of the services were running. I was able to get in via VNC to the colsole. I was able to login and see all the files were there... I tried fixing things to no avail... I almost cried.
As a last chance I restored the snapshot again.
Thankfully that restore worked. I made the needed PHP change that was suggested and then went ahead and did the upgrade again. Once again it upgraded with no issues. I was now able to work in the admin control panel with no errors.
I knew I would need to apply an update for our UI.X SatelliteGuys theme, as a lot has changes in the stylesheets. I went through and run the update. and was greeted with a message that our license expired on August 8th (eek!). so I went over to the authors site to renew it... all was good until I tried checking out and was getting a connector error to Paypal from their server. It seems their shopping cart software is having issues and can't connect to Paypal for payment.
Ok find i said, I will just default things to the default Xenforo Theme Temporarily, I figured to get us back online we can stay like that until Mike fixes his server issue tomorrow.
So I did that, and took a look at things and things looked good. I did a few tests and all tests went find. I was concerned about images being stored properly on our CDN servers and luckily we had no issues there. So I decided to post a message welcoming people back and to let them know why we looked like we did and told them our normal look would be back. (again I was trying to get the site back online). so after posting that I turned things on.
I started upgrading all the ad ons being them to 2.3 and ran into an issue where about 9 of them that needed to be upgraded had expired licenses so I coudlnt download the new update. Not for most Xenforo Add Ons if your license expires you can keeo using what you have however you can not upgrade until your renew. Many of those 9 add ons that were expired, were expired because they have not been updated in YEARS. No reason to pay for something that was no longer being supported. So thats why I never renewed them. Some of them are important to folks like the Whos Reading This Thread, Who had read this thread, the Next and Last Topic at the bottom of posts and more. To upgrade them all was about $200. Its silly some of them are more expensive than many of the official addons.
I saw people were reading and liking my welcome back post... but I noticed no one replied. So I scrolled down to the reply box as I wanted to add something and there was no editor in the reply box... Eeek.
I search Xenforo's website and found a number of fixes for this... but none of them worked. I finally said *F* it... and once again restored the snapshot back to Xenforo 2.2.
And here we are.
Of course after reverting I get a reply back from support to turn off the java optimization service that our CDN offers. And that would have fixed the reply box issue.
So in some point in the future we will do it again as we will have to eventually for security sake. I will make sure we have enough money in the paypal so I can renew everything too. But at least now when I do it, I will know what I am doing and I WILL remember to do a snapshot before doing any work. (Having a snapshot feature is new to this host as we never had it before. I can have up to 3 snapshots and those snapshots get deleted automatically after 30 days.)
So again welcome back and sorry for the down time. But now I know what I need to do and also know there are things I need to renew for them to function on the 2.3 software.
I backed up SatelliteGuys and at 10 AM I backed up the database. I then started to do the upgrade.
Mistake Number 1 - I forgot to do a Snapshot.
One of our custom written (nightly database backup) add ons that I was made for us many years ago caused an issue and corrupted everything. It was so bad that for some reason Cpanel and WHM stopped working even though this update does not go through Cpanel.
I was quickly able to get Cpanel and WHM back online but could not get the site back online even with the database and files backup I did this morning. So I had to do a restore using Jetbackup which is our main backup software. What this did was blew out all of SatelliteGuys so that everything was restored fresh.
So for the next 3 hours I had to restore from a backup. Once that backup was done I went in and removed the custom written nightly database backup addon. I then did a snapshot just in case...
Once that was done the old SatelliteGuys was back online... I then once again started the upgrade to 2.3. This time is had no problems upgrading to 2.3.
Then logged into the admin control panel.and was getting errors. I researched things and found that EXEC must be turned on in PHP. And the best couse of action would be to turn it on and do the upgade again.
So I figured the easiest way to do this was revert the snap shot.
I did that and then... Houston we have a problem. The server wouldn't come back online. I could not SSH into it and none of the services were running. I was able to get in via VNC to the colsole. I was able to login and see all the files were there... I tried fixing things to no avail... I almost cried.
As a last chance I restored the snapshot again.
Thankfully that restore worked. I made the needed PHP change that was suggested and then went ahead and did the upgrade again. Once again it upgraded with no issues. I was now able to work in the admin control panel with no errors.
I knew I would need to apply an update for our UI.X SatelliteGuys theme, as a lot has changes in the stylesheets. I went through and run the update. and was greeted with a message that our license expired on August 8th (eek!). so I went over to the authors site to renew it... all was good until I tried checking out and was getting a connector error to Paypal from their server. It seems their shopping cart software is having issues and can't connect to Paypal for payment.
Ok find i said, I will just default things to the default Xenforo Theme Temporarily, I figured to get us back online we can stay like that until Mike fixes his server issue tomorrow.
So I did that, and took a look at things and things looked good. I did a few tests and all tests went find. I was concerned about images being stored properly on our CDN servers and luckily we had no issues there. So I decided to post a message welcoming people back and to let them know why we looked like we did and told them our normal look would be back. (again I was trying to get the site back online). so after posting that I turned things on.
I started upgrading all the ad ons being them to 2.3 and ran into an issue where about 9 of them that needed to be upgraded had expired licenses so I coudlnt download the new update. Not for most Xenforo Add Ons if your license expires you can keeo using what you have however you can not upgrade until your renew. Many of those 9 add ons that were expired, were expired because they have not been updated in YEARS. No reason to pay for something that was no longer being supported. So thats why I never renewed them. Some of them are important to folks like the Whos Reading This Thread, Who had read this thread, the Next and Last Topic at the bottom of posts and more. To upgrade them all was about $200. Its silly some of them are more expensive than many of the official addons.
I saw people were reading and liking my welcome back post... but I noticed no one replied. So I scrolled down to the reply box as I wanted to add something and there was no editor in the reply box... Eeek.
I search Xenforo's website and found a number of fixes for this... but none of them worked. I finally said *F* it... and once again restored the snapshot back to Xenforo 2.2.
And here we are.
Of course after reverting I get a reply back from support to turn off the java optimization service that our CDN offers. And that would have fixed the reply box issue.
So in some point in the future we will do it again as we will have to eventually for security sake. I will make sure we have enough money in the paypal so I can renew everything too. But at least now when I do it, I will know what I am doing and I WILL remember to do a snapshot before doing any work. (Having a snapshot feature is new to this host as we never had it before. I can have up to 3 snapshots and those snapshots get deleted automatically after 30 days.)
So again welcome back and sorry for the down time. But now I know what I need to do and also know there are things I need to renew for them to function on the 2.3 software.
