November 2023 Server Migration Notes

I have a bad feeling from looking at this post here, where the image (that showed up before migration) is now a broken-image icon.

The URL is to an attachment from another post, in the form https://priuschat.com/proxy.php?image=https%3A%2F%2Fattachments.priuschat.com%2Fattachment-files%2F2021%2F10%2F213026_3A8F3E73-169F-46CA-8FC5-BE8A962C183F.jpeg&hash=2d1e25c772ff24ea472482b7f286cb5c

The failure may mean that the image files didn't all get migrated into the right places for proxy.php to find them, or the hashes don't match what they were before, for some reason. Or there's a database table of images and their hashes and its contents didn't get migrated.

It might be something pretty straightforward to fix, or more of a headache; it may affect a whole lotta posts with links to images.

Edit: yup, it's something to do with the cache; if I ditch the proxy.php and the hash and just ask for the original image URL (https://attachments.priuschat.com/attachment-files/2021/10/213026_3A8F3E73-169F-46CA-8FC5-BE8A962C183F.jpeg), that image is still there.

I am guessing that if I mention that image here:



it will get cached, and should have the same hash it had before, which might then make the original post I linked to work again, and everyone will see no problem with it and think I was imagining things.

Edit again: welp, that didn't happen. Instead there's also a broken-image icon here. The plain URL that I entered has been replaced with a proxy.php URL with a hash (same hash as in the original post), but the image still isn't retrievable from the cache for some reason ... right after the migration it wasn't, and if my posting here made an attempt to re-cache it, that didn't work either.

This particular case (a proxy.php cached copy of an image that's hosted on PriusChat to begin with) isn't even my biggest worry if the cached images didn't get migrated across. My bigger worry is all the cached copies of images people linked to from elsewhere on the web, some of which might no longer be available at their original URLs.

That goes especially for all posts where people linked to parts.toyota diagrams, as none of those exist at the original source anymore.

 

As I edited into post #2, I'm even more worried about images that were in the cache and are no longer accessible at their original URLs. Those can't get rebuilt over time. That would be a big loss. All links anybody ever made to parts.toyota diagrams are probably in that category.

 

Thanks for all your hard work! And thanks for giving us a much needed perspective about what the past 20 years of running PriusChat has been like for you! This community has been truly blessed by you!

 

Thanks Danny. I'm quite a new user here as I have my Prius Prime only since July but the wealth of knowledge and community involvement here is awesome. I'm glad you're keeping it alive and don't plan on letting it die if you decide to stop. Thanks again!

 

I am no stranger to burnout. I retired early from a 20 year career in software development and currently work part time, providing IT support for my local high school. Computer science is discipline that requires 100% focus and maintaining that focus can be extremely stressful.
If I were you, I would be looking for ways to offload what you can to suitably qualified volunteers within the Prius Chat membership. People management has it's own problems, but effective delegation is the key to success when a project gets to big for one person alone to handle.
Thanks for all the hard work so far, you are not alone...

 

'Outliers' in database migrations usually concern me. Until some reason has been shown why a migration treated https://attachments.priuschat.com/attachment-files/2021/10/213026_3A8F3E73-169F-46CA-8FC5-BE8A962C183F.jpeg differently than umpty thousand jpeg files before it and after it, I tend to be kind of on edge wondering how many other outliers are going to be discovered in the days/weeks/months to come.

 

That was well said Danny. Thank you for the many years of hard work keeping the show going .
When you have time, can you explain why paid subscriptions never happened?
I could be wrong, but I think most users would be happy to sign up

 

I know I appreciate keeping PriusChat away from the corporations that already control too much. I was on another car site that got hacked, turned out they had a dozen or more car forums and all the user information was in one location. When that was compromised the whole chain was compromised. Also, what would a large owner with corporate policies do with something like FHOP?

And I kinda like the idea that I met Danny in person (many, many years ago), can't say that about a corporate site.

 

@ChapmanF , would disappearing images be at archive.org? Or some other similar place? Not something I can investigate because archive.org is blocked in some countries. Yeah that thing again.

==
Anyway our @Danny deserves more praise than will probably accumulate in this thread. If a subscription option is developed, I'm in.

==
This is probably not the place to talk about developing a book to publish about Prius and Priuschat. But it is an idea that has occurred to me. I doubt I am alone in that.

 

When I place a bare URL into a post, like this one:

https://priuschat.com/wiki/blink-a-k-a-flash-codes-how-to/

before the migration, it would show up in the post as the title of the wiki page. Now it just shows up as the bare URL.

As far as I'm concerned, either way gets the job done, but I thought it might be worth mentioning the changed behavior.

 

That would depend on whether (or how recently) archive.org had spidered the pages where those images appeared. And I don't think anyone is going to want to discover one-by-one which PriusChat posts are now showing broken images, and somehow determine whether they were just broken pre-migration or not, and then try to retrieve those from archive.org and put them back where they belong on the server (or even try to automate that).

There ought to be a much easier way assuming @Danny has a complete backup of the former server.

I'm still a bit spooked by the suggestion that the one image I noticed first may be an 'outlier'. My own history with such migrations has left me thinking that noticing one 'outlier' or mishandled file, after what was to be a systematic migration, is like noticing one cockroach, and might merit some investigation into just how it could have happened and how much else could have been affected.

I don't mean any of that to sound critical. I know what kind of a job it is. Thanks @Danny! I'm just trying to help identify loose ends, ideally before the new server has diverged so far from the migrated state that solutions get harder.

 

Having trouble adding pics.


Error message:

The following error occurred
There was a problem uploading your file. Img_3645.jpeg

 

^ Ditto. It's not just a Texas thing.

 

Thursday at 9:16 pm:

Friday at 3:40 am

Might be a while.

 

I’d like to thank Danny for creating the forum, and it is the quality of the senior participants that helps make it a reliable and the goto resource for Prius issues and interesting discussions. The migration of any IT system, is a little fraught, I have done a couple, but small-scale stuff and it’s stressful, somewhere, at some point, every time.

Now a bug report. I did do an item and wanted to upload an image, explaining the exact mistake I made that caused a certain fault, this being me mis-placing two 30-Amp fuses in the Prius gen 3 fusebox. I was told to use the ‘upload file’ option when on my iPad, and then I get the option to ‘choose photo/take photo,etc’. I choose a photo and just get an error message with a red band horizontally saying cannot upload or something, but it does give the exact filename of the image in question.

That’s it, images do not upload from my iPad. They did before. Thank you and everyone be safe and keep well as the winter sets in. My best for the festive season, to both sides of the Atlantic, and around the world.