Forum maintenance can be quite an adventure

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So, the SSL certificate renewal script failed to work … again. It seems to be pretty unreliable, so I will need to do the SSL certificate renewals manually in the future (unless I feel like learning to make convenient scripts on my own). :unamused:

Fixing the SSL certificate problem kinda required me to update the Docker software on the server. That was easy, but I got confused during that process and feared that I did something wrong that wiped out all the data on the forum. :sob: That would have been quite bad, since the last full backup of the forum that I had available locally was 3 months old (which is a side-effect of not having my life under control :scream:)! Luckily, I was wrong about having deleted the data. :sweat_smile:

Getting the forum to run with the updated Docker version wasn’t easy, though. In the end, I had to change to the latest beta version of the Discourse software, instead of the latest stable version. That’s usually a good idea, except that the Babble chat plugin isn’t yet adapted to the new plugin API of the beta version. So, we will have to wait until the Babble developers rewrite that plugin. When that’s done, we will hopefully have that shoutbox / chat again. :speaking_head:

At least the update seems to have some advantages. For example, the forum seems to be faster, and there’s a new post navigation system that’s pretty cool. :slight_smile:

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Thankfully, Docker makes it pretty difficult to accidentally wipe data. I trust you will have automated backups soon?

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I’d have to find out how to automate the backup process for that. Initially I didn’t expect to be required to develop serious system administration skills, but I guess there’s no way around that, if I want to sleep soundly in the future. :sweat_smile:

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I can give advice on how to accomplish that as I’ve got some experience in doing such things, so feel free to ask. (In fact, I have admin level access to another discourse forum running in Docker, even though I’m not the primary admin. That means I could probably build a process for you, if that’s needed.)

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That sounds good. Could you link to some kind of tutorial, or is that a more customized process?

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It took a look and it seems discourse has built-in automated backup mechanism. https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-automatic-backups-for-discourse/14855

Looks like you can configure automatic backups to any Amazon S3 compatible provider in an extremely simple way. There was nothing left for me to build :stuck_out_tongue:

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Nice! I just found out about Amazon Glacier though your link. That looks like a surprisingly cheap option for storing automatic backups! :slight_smile: