[STATUS] Scheduled Wesnoth.org site migration downtime

[Iris]

Hi there!

As you might have deduced from the previous status announcement, we are in the process of moving house. The first step was moving our lightest services: add-ons.wesnoth.org, files.wesnoth.org, and devdocs.wesnoth.org. Now it’s time to move the rest!

(This is not a drill.)

On Monday, October 14th, at 17:00 UTC, all Wesnoth.org facilities will be moved to a new server, which will require an extended maintenance downtime for the whole website. This affects in particular the forums board, the wiki, and the primary multiplayer server.

Here is what is going to happen:

• One (1) hour before, the wiki will be set to read-only mode. No more wiki edits will be allowed until the migration is complete.
• At the specified time, the forums will be closed, and all primary multiplayer server instances on server.wesnoth.org will be shut down.
• Our alternate multiplayer servers, server2.wesnoth.org and server3.wesnoth.org will remain online and fully operational during the migration window. Players are advised to use them if their games must/may take place during the migration window.
• add-ons.wesnoth.org, files.wesnoth.org, devdocs.wesnoth.org will not be affected by this migration step as they have already been moved to the new host.

Due to the migration’s nature, I cannot provide you with an accurate length of time in advance. Even after we are done, it may take some time before everyone will be able to connect to the new server due to the intricacies of networking technologies. The raw downtime window is expected to be no more than four hours in the best case scenario, but it may take much longer if things don’t go according to plan! For most people, the perceived downtime will be necessarily longer than four hours, depending on how long it takes for DNS relays to catch up. I know it took about 36 hours for my ISP to report the correct addresses for add-ons.wesnoth.org and others after the previous step.

You didn’t understand that last paragraph? Don’t worry, all you need to know is that the migration will take an indeterminate amount of time. I assure you I will do my best to minimize the downtime, but I can’t really speak for our current provider, which has been the source of a large share of our connectivity issues for the last month or so.

Still, I will publish instructions in the front-page as soon as the migration is complete, for those who absolutely must post “first!” in the forums or wage war against the ‘noobs’ and ‘quitters’ in the MP server. Don’t do those things, by the way.

Finally, during the migration you are more than welcome to ask me for progress updates on IRC (#wesnoth and #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net) or Twitter (@Shikadilord). I promise I won’t bite (too hard)!

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You may discuss this announcement in this shiny thread in Off-Topic which I started for the specific purpose of keeping the forum feeds clean from global announcement replies. I know, it’s a lot of attention to detail for such a minor thing!

Regards