thmmy.gr is an online forum set up and maintained by students of the Electrical and Computer Engineering school at the Aristotle university of Thessaloniki. It is almost 20 years old and currently has 30.454 topics and 1.394.342 posts! It is quite a big forum for Greek standards. I have been a member, moderator and webslave (sys-admin) there for many years.

The forum was first online on July of 2003 and has been mostly online ever since. It originally lived on a redundant computer the university provided. It might actually have migrated through a few machines the faculty provided. A couple of years back, after yet another down-time during an exams period, we decided to migrate to an external VPN.

Moving to a stable system has been a good first step. Now, it is important to secure the deployed instance, improve the user experience and install a few necessary automated pipelines. In this post I will be publishing updates about the effort. Any work done will be summarised here, problems faced, interesting hacks developed, insights, (hopefully) all posted. I hope when/if the project ends, we will have accumulated some useful knowledge and may extract conclusions about the process.

First, lets record the current status of the deploy. The forum is deployed on a famous German VPS service. We are running SMF 1.1 with about a dozen mods (plugins). Also, a few modifications have been made over the years directly inside the running instance SMF source code. No git history or any other documentation available for these.

SMF runs on PHP 5.3 and the database used is MariaDB 5.5. You can easily find a Docker image for MariaDB/MySQL 5.5, but PHP 5.3 is a whole story. It is a very old version and it's hard to find binaries for it, let alone find a working Docker image. Nevertheless, we found a Dockerfile that after some slight modifications reached a semi-buildable state. Sometimes it fails due to some obscure linus repositories being down. Thankfully, since we have built it at least once, we are covered as long as we have the image backed up.

Various people, including myself, have made efforts to update the platform in the past, but failed mainly due to lack of time. These efforts have so far been purely documented. The two main hurdles are the SMF update path (i.e. the database schema update) and the update of the mods. Mods are also interfering with the platform update, because some of them apply migrations to the database. Also, there are custom mods created by people on old management teams whose purpose and function is neither documented nor clear.

SMF's documentation is decent, and it recommends doing the update on two steps, first going to v2.0 and then to the latest. On my old attempts one of the updates usually breaks. I only managed to make it succeed one time, but I did not document the exact process 🤦. The main problem that arises that the database migration fails due to unexpected columns on the tables (see migrations introduced by mods mentioned above).

The latest update efforts have been my personal project. But, a couple other people have stepped up and offered to help. To accommodate this while exposing as little of the data as possible, I wrote an SQL script that deletes and/or obfuscates all entries except the ones the developer already has access to. This way I can extract personalised dumps that they can use to develop the update process. That is the last thing I've done and I have not been occupied with this project in a long while.

Now that we have a summary of the situation, we can lay out the desired goals. This includes:

• upgrade from SMF 1.1 to the latest version
• upgrade the mods to the latest version or find new equivalents
• migrate the database to postgres
• setup automated backups
• add a couple of modern themes
• add a mod for exposing an API
• add a mod for elastic integration
• setup some monitoring, if necessary

February 20, 2023

February 22, 2023

February 26, 2023

March 09, 2023

March 13, 2023

March 19, 2023

March 19, 2023

March 22, 2023

March 22, 2023

April 17, 2023