Wesnoth.org moving hosts

As announced in the Wesnoth.org forums, today (although it’s still yesterday for me) we are moving most of Wesnoth.org’s facilities to a new host, to continue the migration process that started with the previous move of add-ons.wesnoth.org, devdocs.wesnoth.org, and files.wesnoth.org.

What you probably wouldn’t guess from the announcement is how complicated the underlying machinery actually is. I did not want to clog up the post with additional details because that is often confusing for most people, but here is a list of services that will be directly affected by this whole operation:

  • www.wesnoth.org — Static front page, downtime notices, wiki images
  • The system statistics recollection and report system
  • The database server, used by MediaWiki, phpBB, and wesnothd below
  • wiki.wesnoth.org — MediaWiki application, site stylesheets
  • forums.wesnoth.org — phpBB application, forum attachments
  • r.wesnoth.org — Short forum URLs
  • servers.wesnoth.org — wesnothd application instances for Wesnoth 1.10 (stable), 1.11 (development), 1.8 (oldstable), 1.6 (ancientstable), and Git master/version redirection
  • wesnothd.wesnoth.org — wesnothd statistics for the current stable, development, and oldstable server instances
  • gettext.wesnoth.org — Translation statistics for mainline and user-made (WesCamp-i18n) content
  • eclipse.wesnoth.org — Timotei’s IDE thing and stuff
  • units.wesnoth.org — Automatically-generated mainline and UMC unit trees
  • replays.wesnoth.org — Archive of replays of MP games with observers enabled

And the redirection rules for various subdomain aliases:

  • coc.wesnoth.org [wiki.w.o]— Multiplayer Code of Conduct
  • tgt.wesnoth.org [forums.w.o] — TGT tournament topic in Multiplayer Development
  • manual.wesnoth.org [wiki.w.o] — Game manual
  • devhelp.wesnoth.org [wiki.w.o] — Developer-oriented resources
  • git.wesnoth.org [github.com] — GitHub repository
  • changelog.wesnoth.org, *-changelog.wesnoth.org [github.com] — Release changelogs
  • bugs.wesnoth.org, patches.wesnoth.org [gna.org] — Issue tracker for the Gna.org project
  • svn.wesnoth.org, websvn.wesnoth.org [gna.org] — SVN repository at Gna.org
  • ... and many, many others, including hyphen/number variations of the above.

Because we are seriously understaffed, I have literally spent months copying things over, testing, upgrading, rebuilding, and even redoing some steps several times in some cases. However, only during the last month I have been working non-stop on stuff, realizing the deplorable operating conditions of a couple of our services, one of which I cannot fix on my own.

Today’s migration doubles as a full OS upgrade accompanied by an extensive internal network architecture change, as well as an upgrade of the forums and wiki applications. Upgrading the forums has never been a big deal for me, but everything else is uncharted territory. Given these complications, I have spent most of the aforementioned amount of time learning and testing things that shouldn’t really be my business in an ideal world, MediaWiki included. It’s not a particularly rewarding task (aside from the learning experience), but it must be done for the sake of all... especially that of our finances department.

I’m awfully anxious about all this. I’m going to make sure to have a cup of tea handy when the time comes.

Miscellaneous, Software, Wesnoth