Currently, REC Networks has been operating on the same infrastructure since 2011 and has expanded over the years to a fleet of smaller shared hosting servers. This environment presents a lot of limitations and seriously sacrifices overall system performance.
About System 40
System 40 will move the REC Universe (our collection of websites and data repositories) to a dedicated server environment that is not shared and we have full control of all available storage and memory.
System 40 will upgrade the underlying operating system, content management systems (CMS) and PHP program language version to the most recent stable versions in order to improve performance and security as well as better future-proof our services for future expansion. We are also going to use this to address current issues such as site blocking from Viasat and other providers that have plagued the current site due to our decade-old choice in hosting providers.
This will mean that virtually every public facing system as well as back-end systems that are used to support the REC Universe will either need to be rewritten or otherwise modified in order to support the new environment.
About this site
This site will be used internally in order to track the progress of these projects and will be used externally to communicate the progress of those projects.
About the transition
The transition will take time. A lot of time. We will do this through:
- Building the base underlying system.
- Determining which content should be eligible for System 40 and which content should be declared as obsolete.
- Transitioning static data sets to the new server.
- Replicating dynamic data sets on the new server.
- Developing the back-end tools necessary to support the dynamic data sets resulting in temporary dual-operation where needed.
- Constructing various CMS interfaces within the System 40 environment and then transitioning the content from the old environment.
- Building new interfaces for the CMS to replace those that were designed for the older CMS but are no longer supported in a more modern CMS environment.
- Rebuilding the standalone REC tools that are outside of the CMS to be compatible with the new environment and potentially taking advantages of advancements in the PHP programming language along the way.
- Transitioning users from the old environment to the new environment.
- Wind down operations on the old environment and eventual retirement of that old environment.
There will be bumps in the road
This transition is not being underwritten and we have very limited resources to make this transition. Please be patient if services are not working the way they should be. We also note that there may be changes in the user interfaces for some services as plan to take advantage of some modern web design standards as we transition through.
We also note that there may be times when our systems may be unavailable. We will try to schedule any major outages over the weekend but because development is taking place in a totally different environment, many of the "live updates" that users may have experienced in the past in the current environment will not take place.
Please note that this project is being handled by a team of one. We have zero funding to bring in any outside designers.
Transparency
On this site, we will try to be as transparent as possible regarding the project. Obviously, there are various confidential and "trade secret" subjects that we will not discuss in public. Overall, we need to make sure that we do provide as much information as possible to our user base and to the agencies which provide the data that is collected by the REC Universe.
Look out Mr. Toad, this is going to be a wild ride.