How long is "a while"...? Theres a friggin hurricane coming, and if I don't have BTP, I'll have to.... gulp... spend quality time w/ the girlfriend....

Lol.. I'm not sure. I have a variety of options, and I will choose the fastest always until it goes wrong, and then I will go to the next fastest one etc. I have to see how it goes, unfortunately..

BTP will be down for forum upgrade maintenance from 1am CST Tues 25 October 05 until I get it done. Hopefully it'll be back up by 9am.

There is a *chance* that this work will last longer. All I can say is that I'll do my best, but you never can tell how much work these things are until you're in the middle of them.

Wish me luck!

Live migrations are usually troublesome. Thanks and good luck, it'll be worth it.

Yeah, this isn't a server move yet, just a forum upgrade. I have to upgrade because the forum software is considerably out of date and needs security patches.

Well, it will have taken just over 3 hours when I've finished, which isn't too bad.

I managed to upgrade by patch (after a multitude of unsuccessful attempts followed by the usual workarounds) to the latest version, and the database table modifications seem to have worked just fine.

We are now running the latest version of the software which is 2.0.17, a whole 7 versions higher than what we were. The upgraded software stops us (and whoever hosts us) from being hacked.

If you see any odd behaviour as a result of this upgrade, please report it to me via PM or email or in this topic (it seems likely that *something* will be a bit fishy).

However, it is likely that users who had previously selected 'remember me' for login will have to re-authenticate and select that option again, as I also corrected our previously garbled cookie name.

Damn good job man but if u did in 3 hours I think u are overpaid. LOL. Many, many thanks for ALL your hard work.

Why thankee, kind Sir

I created a mirror of the database and the forum itself at a different URL then hit a problem running the PHP patches through. I think the patch command on this Linux system was incompatible with the diff output generated by the phpBB folks, or the files had MSDOS linebreaks in them and that confoozed it. In any event the issue was solved when I used a Windoze version of 'patch' and did the work on my machine, resolved all the rejected hunks by hand, made the schema changes, uploaded the patched files, tested the major functionality and then swapped the live site for the upgraded mirror.

It'll be faster next time, promise It was the patch failures that had me scratching my head, and I *really* didn't want to do a clean install of phpBB and re-apply all my mods and little bits of restyling. THAT would have been horrific.

good job with the upgrade.

I'm wondering if you really just like speeching geek when describing what you did or trying to make it sound more technical than what it was. I can summarize the procedure in one line "I did some stuff, but now its up and running and better than before."

Dammit, that's the procedure I'll use next time.

1) "BTP will go down sometime coz I have to do some stuff'

2) "I did the stuff and it seemed to work"

Sorted.