IMPORTANT - Forum Server Migration - Updated @ 23:10 26/04

[AeroResource]

As many will be aware, recently both the Fighter Control and Civilian Aviation forums have suffered from unexpected outages which culminated in a 24 hour period of downtime over Tuesday/Wednesday of this week. Whilst these outages have been out of our direct control, this is not something that we wish to continue happening therefore have taken the decision to move both forums to a new server. This move has been planned for some time as part of pre-requisite work to upgrade the forum software however the recent outages have accelerated the migration to the new server in the hopes that we can avoid a repeat.

What does this mean for Fighter Control?

The FC forums will be migrating to the new server as of 8pm Thursday 26th April. We appreciate that this is short notice however hope you agree that the sooner these issues are resolved the better. At 8pm, the forum will be placed in to a Read Only mode to prevent any new posts or alterations to take place. In the background, data will be migrated to the new server and testing carried out to validate everything is correct. This is expected to take a few hours to complete to a level where we will have the required confidence levels to continue with the migration. Once happy that this has worked as expected, a DNS change will be made to repoint the http://www.fightercontrol.co.uk URL to the new server. Due to the nature of DNS propagation, this may not be an instant change for many users and can take up to 24 hours to fully replicate across all internet DNS servers (something which is outside of our control). The hope is that by the morning of Friday 27th the vast majority of our users DNS servers will have received the update therefore downtime should be kept to a minimum. A holding page will also be placed on the old server at the point of the DNS change to make it clear that it is no longer in use. Of course, in the event that the migration does not go to plan at any stage during the process, the forum will be re-activated on the old server.

Updates on progress will be posted on the AeroResource Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/aeroresource) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/aeroresource) pages. Neither of these should require you to be signed up to the services in order to view the updates.

Once again, we apologies for the recent downtime and instability of the forum and hope that the server migration followed by subsequent planned upgrades will help alleviate these issues.

[AeroResource]

UPDATE - @ 23:10 26th April

The forum has been successfully migrated to the new server with as much testing as possible carried out. The DNS records have been updated to point at the new server however, as mentioned, this could take up to 24 hours to fully replicate around the internet so there may still be intermittent connectivity issues.

If there are any issues experienced with the forum operation itself please post in the Forum Technical section with as much information as possible.