I was tasked to move our NorCalChallengers club’s website onto a different service provider as our previous webmaster hasn’t had the opportunity to maintain the site after graciously hosting it for several years.

I performed a dry-run on Saturday to see what the major issues would be, and then on Sunday morning got the info I needed to be able to switch the DNS servers to point to the new servers. Since the main site would be down for several hours, I started “live blogging” about the progress on the “Maintenance In Progress” page that people were served during the downtime. Here’s what my Sunday looked like.

• 2:10 p.m. - Backup complete. Copying files to new server.
• 2:26 p.m. - Backup/Restore application license transferred successfully.
• 2:30 p.m. - Database restore in progress.
• 2:35 p.m. - File restore in progress.
• 2:37 p.m. - File restore complete. Time to test if things still work, then upgrade to latest software.
• 2:43 p.m. - Sanity passed. Upgrading to DotNetNuke_Community_05.04.04_Upgrade.
• 2:46 p.m. - Upgrading web.config from .NET Framework 2.0 to 3.5.
• 2:50 p.m. - Fixing Telerik.Web.UI version conflict.
• 2:54 p.m. - Fixing chat module compile error.
• 2:55 p.m. - 05.04.04 Automatic upgrade running.
• 2:55 p.m. - Complete. Sanity test time.
• 2:58 p.m. - OK. Starting upload of 05.05.00 upgrade files.
• 3:04 p.m. - Copy complete. 05.05.00 upgrade running.
• 3:04 p.m. - Complete. Sanity test.
• 3:05 p.m. - Fail: Events are missing.
• 3:23 p.m. - Events fixed by updating to latest Events module.
• 3:24 p.m. - Copy 05.06.03 files.
• 3:29 p.m. - Auto-update and sanity.
• 3:32 p.m. - Sanity OK. Copy 06.01.00 files.
• 3:39 p.m. - Auto-update and sanity for 06.01.00. If this passes, I'll flip the DNS and this will start moving users over to the new server little by little.
• 3:42 p.m. - Flipping domain DNS servers.
• 4:22 p.m. - Purchasing and upgrading Active Forums.
• 4:34 p.m. - Active Forums Update complete. Mid-stream backup. Continue fixing style issues.
• 4:44 p.m. - Forums and events should be readable now.
• 4:45 p.m. - Removing "Member Videos" page since that hasn't worked in ages.
• 4:50 p.m. - Let's see if we can get that header wrangled to look better.
• 5:31 p.m. - OK, so what's the deal with the columns and footer colliding into each other?
• 5:44 p.m. - "Users online" module updated.
• 5:46 p.m. - "Newsfeeds" module updated.
• 5:47 p.m. - "Media" module updated.
• 5:48 p.m. - "Links" module updated.
• 5:49 p.m. - "Documents" module updated.
• 5:50 p.m. - "Blog" module updated.
• 5:51 p.m. - Dinner time.
• 6:09 p.m. - ...and I'm back. Where was I?
• 6:28 p.m. - Home page layout fixed. The offending code was in the "Latest Public Forum Topics" module.
• 6:32 p.m. - Footer looks a little better now.
• 6:56 p.m. - Been working on the new header logo.
• 7:38 p.m. - That will have to do for now.
• 7:46 p.m. - Uh... Private messages is still a mess.
• 7:54 p.m. - OK, better.
• 8:06 p.m. - The Gallery module doesn't allow fine grained control over permissions. We'll just have to trust each other.
• 8:13 p.m. - I think that's about it for today. Now we just have to wait for the internet to do its thing and let everyone see the new site. Then we can let the hatin' begin on the new look :)
• 8:21 p.m. - Removed the blog page until we figure out what we want to do with that and get it set up correctly.
• 8:52 p.m. - Found a font issue in private messages.
• 9:04 p.m. - Administrative passwords changed.