Forum:Major Technical Changes
Hello everyone!
It has been a busy few weeks for me recently and luckily, all related to Orain. I have made quite a few changes to how Orain operates in the background and how every single step of a user's experience with Orain can be managed by us with no third party failures. So, let's begin.
- HHVM
As I assume you all know, I had been testing with HHVM as a new replacement for PHP Zend. My tests went well and with a bit of work; you are all now using HHVM whether you opted in or not, whether you have an account or not. The statistics and the reports by uses from what I see are all relatively positive within regards to HHVM so I am calling this a successful deployment.
- Ubuntu not Debian
With the HHVM deployment to all by default, I also took the time to re-image all of our servers to use Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) instead of Debian 7 (Wheezy). This has no real impact for the end user but is a major change for the sysadmins at Orain.
- DNS
Today, I finished the move over with our DNS from using a third party provider (CloudFlare) to hosting it on our own servers. This brings a few nice advantages to the end user such as the fact custom domains can now point to our DNS allowing a second method of ensuring domains keep in line with us at all times. The orain.org domain already points to these new nameservers which are ns1 and ns2 dot orain.org. ns1 is served off prod6 and so is ns2 (currently for the sake of getting the infrastructure up and easily movable) but the objective for tonight is to have it running off prod7 as a cache. All of the DNS is now openly view able (and editable!) at our dns repo on GitHub.
On behalf of Orain staff, John (talk) 19:31, 11 October 2014 (BST)