So, I just want to give everyone an update on what's going on with our server situation here and what we're kinda trying to deal with.
As you may or may not know, the person that previously setup and maintained the MTC servers parted ways with us back in February. The server setup that we inherited from him is, tbh, a little over our heads. We're setup on multiple servers with stuff like HAProxy and Kubernetes that we just don't really feel is necessary for a little MTurk forum like this. We've also been told by people that have worked with our setup recently, that do server stuff for a living, that it's over-engineered and completely overkill for our needs. It also seems to be breaking down on us and we haven't been able to figure out why. Our previous server person made some changes before handing things over to us, which included reconfiguring at least one of the kubernetes clusters, so we're not sure if the issues we're having may be related to something he changed. We attempted to reach out to him about a month ago, but he never got back to us, so I think this is something that we're going to have to figure out on our own.
So here's our plan: We think it would be best for us to get away from this setup and onto something a little more simple and easier to maintain. We think the easiest way to go about that would be to setup a new server alongside our current ones and migrate the database to it. Once everything is setup there, we can point the domain and HAProxy at the new server until the DNS fully propogates, then shut down HAProxy and the rest of the old setup. We think it's also safer this way because if we run into any unforeseen issues with the migration and something doesn't quite work, we'll still have the older setup (our current one) to fall back on. I tested this last night with a couple test forums that I have setup on other servers and it worked really well. Of course, the database from the test forum that I used was much, much smaller than MTC's database (and the server was configured in a completely different way), so I would like to do at least one or two test runs with the actual MTC database before doing this for real. I'm hoping to be able try that out this weekend some time.
So anyways, yeah. That's the current situation and what we're kinda wanting to do. I know we had a rather lengthy downtime on Tuesday, and a brief hiccup yesterday, but we are working on a sustainable solution to this ongoing problem. Just please be patient and bear with us (learning is a slow process). Also, if you happen to know anything about this sort of thing and you think we're stupid for even considering what I said above, please let us know. I'm very new to this, so I welcome any input I can get from people that know what they're talking about.
Thanks, everyone. <3
