Good day from Riverton. On this site, we will maintain a blog to document the progress we are making in the System 40 project. System 40 (named after REC Networks' 40 year anniversary) is the largest IT undertaking that I have ever done here.
The current infrastructure (the REC Universe) is nearly 14 years old. We are still running an ancient operating system and Drupal 7 for our Content Management System (CMS). Over the years, we have had to piecemeal additional virtual hosting accounts in order to keep up. It was time to move to a more dedicated solution so we can have everything under one roof.
This also means that we can upgrade our operating system and CMS in a manner that will cause the least disruption to the current operation. Since Drupal 7 will soon be at end of life, we will be changing to Drupal 10, which means several new challenges. First, with the upgrade in operating system, we will be converting from PHP 5 to PHP 8, which means we will need to make modifications to the source code of every single application, both external and internal. This is going to take time. Also, with Drupal 10, we will not have the same PHP module available to us for the "toybox" applications (those interactive services that run on the recnet.com domain right now). We do have a solution for that and we will do the process to make the toybox applications compatible with Drupal 10.
We have already imported over the data from Drupal 7 to the new server so the archive of news posts and other educational material will find its way to the new site. Some of the aspects of the old site did not come over correctly, such as the FAQ. One of the projects will be going through each FAQ question (which there's probably about 100 or so) and adding some additional parameters. This is a time consuming effort. We will be replicating the database on the new site but because of the ongoing updating of our data (eLMS, IPAWS, etc.), we will be selecting a cut over date on a weekend to move all of the data over. For now, the new system will be feeding off of the old database until a time when we have all of the internal applications that are used to update those databases running stable in the new environment. Once that happens, we will be running two parallel instances of eLMS, IPAWS and other live services until everything is cut over to the new system. Once everything is cut over, we will be retiring the old architecture.
The high level project plan is as follows:
- Set up the underlying operating system and content management (this is done).
- Fix the issues related to the transition from Drupal 7 to 10 (this is what we are working on now).
- Convert all of the toybox applications to work in System 40.
- Move traffic for the recnet.com website to System 40. This will provide access to the static content and the toybox applications.
- Start working on the internal applications such as eLMS, the IPAWS monitor, other programs used for accessing outside APIs, the J1 supporting functions and the handling of incoming raw data dumps.
- Stabilize the other ancillary systems and start moving that traffic over.
- Work on new PHP 8 versions of the other standalone services (FCCdata, FCC.today, myLPFM, etc.) and prepare them for transition to the new environment.
- Once we make a standalone service stable on System 40, move that traffic over.
- Retire the old infrastructure.
I do feel that this project will take several months. Some activities may need to take place only on the weekends, especially anything involving live data and/or the need to make higher than ususal calls to outside APIs.
The new infrasturcture as a much higher memory and storage headroom than our current system which will allow our systems to breathe better. This will also address the access issues from Viasat and other ISPs that block some of our traffic.
When the new systems come up, especially in the case of the recnet.com main content site, you will definite notice some "look and feel" changes. However, we are striving to assure that all URLs remain the same in the transition so your bookmarks will be safe.
Thank you for your patience and as always, donations to the cause are always appreciated.
=m