Blogging Roller

Since the Roller 1.0RC1 release, I've been working on upgrading blogs.sun.com. The upgrade is a little more challenging than upgrades I've done before because of the security concerns and because my manager (quite reasonably) insists that there be no down time. I'm not worried at all, of course -- as we all know Roller upgrades never cause any downtime.

To achieve a no-downtime upgrade, we are taking the side-by-side upgrade approach. We install the new Roller on a new server, side-by-side with the old server. We periodically sync the data from the old server to the new server. We test the new server until it performs to our satisfaction and then we turn off the old and switch traffic the new.

So, current status is this: we have a side-by-side install up and running, but we haven't announced it's location yet. The new program SyncUpdate098Xto1000.java is running from cron, keeping the databases in sync. We run rsync from cron to keep the uploaded files in sync. Now we need to do some testing, fix some bugs, do some more testing, and flip the switch. After that, we'll release Roller 1.0.