Morning Folks:
So, you should be reading this on a website being hosted from the cloud. But you're not. "This is not the website you were hoping for!" :-)
Houston, We Had a Problem
Things started out reasonably well, and very much on schedule. What we're doing to make sure things are the same both on the Cloud and the local server is "rsyncing" them. Rsync is a program that has been around for decades and is something we use for backups here at the AAVSO. It works by making sure that what is in the source directory is the same as what is in the destination directory, but it does this intelligently so that only the differences are transmitted over the wire. We have been doing this type of synching between Mira and the cloud rather regularly for the last week as we've been testing things and moving them. It got to a point where I could predict to within 2 minutes how long each sync would take.
The databases synched on schedule and within their allotted time. So did the citizensky site. The AAVSO site took longer than I thought, and when I checked the directory, something had gone wrong.
Safety First!
Consulting with Arne and Matt, who where here at the the time, I decided to abort the process. The website is too critical to all of us for something that surprising to happen during an operation like this, and I felt that we would have the least downtime if we aborted the migration now, I spent time to figure out what went wrong while everyone could use the website as normal, and then do a couple of tests before we tried the migration again. It was also felt to be the safest course of action.
So, we'll try this again, I suspect, a bit later this week. I'll keep everyone informed!
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Doc Kinne
Astronomical Technologist
AAVSO