So it came up in the thread about Firefox no longer liking to load the site that our long-time hosting situation is ending soon. Dave, who has hosted us for decades, has moved on from the sysadmin thing, and feels he no longer has the time or energy to devote to keeping a server current vs. all the many security threats out there these days. He's looking to shut it down at the end of the year.

I'm working on gathering up enough spoons to pursue options, which will most likely take the form of the least expensive commercially hosted situation I can find. What that will mean to the site's hopelessly outdated software is unknown, but probably nothing good.

The final straw for all this appears to be the recently discovered vulnerabilities of PHP, which may or may not even be patchable for in the version we're using. Dave has cautioned me that if the server ends up being compromised by that route, he'll have to take it down early, which... well, if it suddenly disappears without warning or any sign of a plan, that'll be because that happened and I didn't have my shit together yet. Just so you know. :/

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

End of an age.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Well nuts, I figured this would come someday. I've lurked for a long time, but if you rattle the can, I'll sub my $5 in. I've gotten too much enjoyment from EPU over the years not to.

I'll repeat the offer I made in the earlier thread: I run an underutilized
web server (for my personal blog and a couple other sites) and I'd be happy
to host a static archive of eyrie-productions.com there, as an interim
solution to keep the stories, at least, accessible until something more
permanent can be arranged.

(Regrettably, I don't think I can afford the time commitment of being the permanent new host, or help out much with migration to newer forum software etc.)

>I'll repeat the offer I made in the earlier thread: I run an
>underutilized
>web server (for my personal blog and a couple other sites) and I'd be
>happy
>to host a static archive of eyrie-productions.com there, as an interim
>solution to keep the stories, at least, accessible until something
>more
>permanent can be arranged.

That would be much appreciated. I also need to pull a backup for safekeeping on this end.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

OK. I won't be able to set up the space until the weekend but I'll email you about uploading files as soon as I have set it up.

I don't have any money, but I have nothing but time. I could try and figure out how to migrate the forum to modern software.

The last time I did any sort of dive into figuring out where I'd want to host the MUD I'm working on, DigitalOcean seemed like a pretty decent choice. As far as migration goes, wish I could help but I would have no idea where to start.

Hetzner would appear to be a decent, scaleable, permanent hosting solution. They mostly use off the shelf components so their overheads are fairly low, as their prices appear to also be.

I'd offer my own server for things, considering how low-impact the place appears to be, but I don't know if an ancient Q6600 with 8 gigs of ram is enough for even a modest site and forum like this. Almost certainly wouldn't be for anything more up to date.

I've had quite good luck with phpBB *but* I admit I'm no expert; I rely on the banlist and IP blocking which seems to work fine for my very low-traffic fora. I really couldn't say whether it's secure or not.

That said, regardless of what forum you decide to shift to, IIRC we're on the old jankity version of DCForum that still uses flat files. I have a *crapton* of experience parsing such beasts and getting them into usable formats (CSV, JSON, etc) for ingestion into wherever you wanna go. I'd be happy to volunteer to do that.

My day job involves 70's-era mainframe file ingestion into modern databases. So... yeah. DCForum don't scare me. :D

--sofaspud
--

LAST EDITED ON Oct-30-26 AT 01:07 AM (EDT)
 
Actually, that's a good point.

There's been a lot of backporting for the unsupported versions of PHP...AND as far as I'm aware, this bug was introduced a certain time ago. I saw something about ten years? This forum is ancient enough that it might actually be secure from the PHPocalypse by sheer dint of being too old to have the bug.

I'm an idiot and mistook what you were saying for what the site runs on.

>I'm an idiot and mistook what you were saying for what the site runs
>on.

Well, it's the main site, not the Forum, that's built on now-antique PHP, so it doesn't directly connect to what Sofaspud was talking about, but still, you may have had a valid point...

I never learned to do much with the server-side includes and master page stuff that were the reasons Truss used PHP to build the back end of the site in the first place, so maybe the thing to do would be to figure out a way of converting it all to flat files for re-homing. I certainly don't have the bandwidth to learn a current way of doing what the old PHP was built to do, anyway.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

So how are we going to be kept in the loop as to the new location of the forum and the story uploads? I keep trying to get people I know to read stuff here, and if 35 years of fanfic just disappears I'll be sadge.

No takey away Eyrie verse.

Believe me, I don't want to see 35 years of fannish history disappear any more than you do.

Gryphon and I are working on setting up a static archive of the website, on stable hosting; I do not know how long this will take but I hope to be able to announce the archive's location by the end of the week. We also have a plan to set up an arrangement that will let interested people (from here and elsewhere) collaborate on modernizing the site back-end, which should make it easier to set up the live site on permanent new hosting; that may take a bit longer.

As long as the old host remains up, I will post updates here. If the old host has to be taken down before a new live site is ready, the static archive will get promoted to be www.eyrie-productions.com so that links don't break; at that point posting to the Forum will not work anymore, but most posts should remain visible. If that becomes necessary, we will figure out some interim means of communication and put a note on the static archive's "what's new" page pointing at it.

Thanks, great update, good news.

>So how are we going to be kept in the loop as to the new location of
>the forum and the story uploads?

Just to add to what zwol said, my usernames on Twitter and Bluesky are the same as the gmail one mentioned in my .sig below, and you can bet I'll be ranting there if the server goes bang ahead of its expected end date. If that occurs, it'll take a little while for the requisite DNS update to propagate, but that will at least be a way of finding out that the process has started.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>So how are we going to be kept in the loop as to the new location of
>>the forum and the story uploads?
>
>Just to add to what zwol said, my usernames on Twitter and Bluesky are
>the same as the gmail one mentioned in my .sig below, and you can bet
>I'll be ranting there if the server goes bang ahead of its expected
>end date. If that occurs, it'll take a little while for the requisite
>DNS update to propagate, but that will at least be a way of finding
>out that the process has started.

And I'm not on either of those, but I can be found over here: https://masto.hackers.town/@zwol I'll also be posting about this if need be.