It has taken three full weeks to fully install the new operating system (FreeBSD 15.0), copy over the files, and make it work. When every file was copied over, nothing worked. And when I say nothing worked, I mean nothing worked. The Apache web server was up and running, the database server was up and running, but nothing worked. From that point on, it took 3 weeks to go over (editing) all approximately 300 scripts, to get them to run and to test them, to read them and properly display them.
I now have an understanding of the kind of crap that Fred went through when conditions changed in the scripting language and rantburg.com went down for so long.
The original plan was that after the backup server ran at least 60 days, I’d begin work on moving the new operating system to the main server. But given the amount of editing and effort that went into getting the backup server going (actually it is s'posed to be a mirror of the main server), I have no intention of keeping rantburg.com down for three days, let alone three weeks for the changeover.
In approximately one week I will begin work on the new main server, bearing the basic tree of the main server, then copy over the newly edited files from the backup server to this temporary server. What the tech people tell me is that when I am done, they will point the original IP to the new main server, changing it over seamlessly. And from that point on, rantburg.com will reside in its new, permanent home.
What is most vexing about this entire process is that the main server operates on FreeBSD 14.3, it should have behaved the same as FreeBSD 15.0. I can only assume it is by the sheer grace of God that rantburg.com has been running as it had before, without too many problems.
ADDITIONAL DATA
The Officers Club is open and available to all. It originally was created as a haven for private communication between moderators and regulars. Now some Rantburgers prefer to congregate on the Facebook group chat instead.
The officers Club is not available between 15 minutes after the hour and 45 minutes after the hour. So, you can reliably access it 15 minutes before the hour util 15 minutes after the hour. The server goes dark every four hours as the database is updated, going dark 15 minutes after the hour to 15 minutes before the hour.
In the coming days I will work to implement a dynamic table firewall scheme for the main server, with the rules focusing on Russian spammers (not really a problem on the main server) and two other tables, one of them being an emergency table to immediately stop spam attacks and give me time to update the main firewall, without having to reboot.