Old installation failing upgrade

Installation
1

A nonprofit I work with has a Discourse installation 2.9.0.beta1, for which maintenance fell to me when the original admin moved on. When I tried to update the SMTP credentials, I learned that the installation can neither rebuild itself nor safely upgrade, via web or via commandline. (If I hadn’t had a hot backup of the instance made before work began, this would’ve been a bad time.) The problem appears to happen fairly deep in Ruby, and I can capture logs if they’d seem helpful.

I thought it might just be too old to gracefully update, so I tried a recovery process instead, creating a new fresh Discourse instance and then loading the most recent backup of the forum into it, but this process also failed inconclusively, with what I think were database column errors before the upgrade process went nonresponsive.

What would be the best way to proceed from where we’re standing? The forum is currently functional this minute, I can just neither upgrade nor, apparently, employ a backup. Should I continue to try for recovery, should I redouble my efforts to upgrade and go capture logs to get started, or is there a third option I don’t see?

2

You need to move to a new virtual machine. It’s likely that your os is to old to upgrade docker you a supported version.

It’s better to move to a new vm that will be on newer hardware that is faster and cheaper.

You can see Move a Discourse site to another VPS with rsync.

If you want to pay to have it done you can contact me via dashboard.literatecomputing.com

3

Hmm.

Docker versioning did not seem to play a role in why Ruby builds collapsed but I suppose it’s possible. The docker pulls that were part of the rebuild did not appear to have any exceptional failure states. This does look like I can try it, though. Thanks for the reply!

1 Like
4

What does

 cat /etc/issue

Say?

And

  docker --version
5 
root@ip-[...]:~# cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS \n \l

root@ip-[...]:~# docker --version
Docker version 17.05.0-ce, build 89658be
6

Not supported.

Beyond end of life.

2 Likes
7

Thanks for the reply. I’m attempting a migration now, though apparently that’s going to be a process.

8

It’s surprising how each migration is a snowflake. Even with a very stable script.