We've made great progress on the new repository and web site servers and are happy to report that all is going very well! As you may recall, we've been having server problems for some time on our 5 year old hardware and have been undergoing the first phase of our modernization process! Time for another update...
We split the FreePBX servers into two virtual systems that represent this website and the Module Admin online repository that has often been referred to as the mirror despite the fact that there was only one such site. We have spent the last couple weeks staging these systems and migrating the environment to create an exact replica of the current FreePBX.org server with a handful of necessary changes to improve it. During the last week, we’ve been syncing the live site to these two virtual systems every two hours to assure a completely up-to-date environment. In addition to the webstite and repository we also have an identical replica of both these systems that will be part of the high availability setup.
Yesterday we took some new steps. We added the live SQL replication between the new website and its backup as well as the same for the repository system. Currently both the primary and backup systems live on the same physical server but that will be changing within the next couple weeks as we are preparing a home in a second facility where these two alternate systems will live. In the case of the repository we have built in an automatic failover ability in FreePBX 2.10 and will be enabling that ability shortly. As always, Schmooze Com Inc. has been invaluable in their technical expertise in helping us prepare for and stage much of this and a special thanks goes to Tony Lewis for much of this!
The second big step we took yesterday was to make the repository live by pointing the DNS record to the new server. We’ve watched the traffic to the old repository die to almost a trickle as badly behaved DNS sources have slowly updated their stale records. (We had set the TTL to 60 in preparation for this). So far we have not seen any concerns raised about this migration.
If all goes well, we plan on bringing the new website online tonight by pointing the DNS record to it. For most of you this should be a seamless transition that goes unnoticed. For those of you who receive stale DNS data that there will be glitches. This is often the case for OpenDNS and Microsoft based DNS servers. If you fall in one of these categories then you will end up on a web page that gives you further instructions on how to get to the site. (If your timing is bad, you may hit a very short window of about 5-10 minutes when we disable apache to get the last sync finished and assure there is no data loss from bad timing.)
OTTS Early Bird Special Ends Friday
Just a quick note on the upcoming FreePBX OTTS Class. The current Early Bird Special expires Friday so if you are thinking of coming, don’t let yourself get surprised. We are also well over half full at this point and are looking forward to seeing some of you next month!
For now we’ll update you as soon as we have more news on all that is going on!
Philippe On behalf of the FreePBX Team!