Move to dedicated AWS account

[emk]

Our apologies for the (scheduled) downtime!

Right now, the forum is running on my personal AWS account, after last week's late night emergency migration. This has three major problems:

• It's hard to grant administrative access to other people.
• There's no way to see what the forum actually costs to run, because forum billing is mixed in with billing for my personal sites.
• The emergency setup cut a lot of corners that we want to fix before living with them forever. :-)

In the interests of maintainability and transparency, we're moving the forum to a dedicated AWS account.

Step needed to complete the switchover

• [x] Set up Terrraform for the new account.
• [x] Configure new GitHub → ECS deployment pipelines, allowing us to deploy new forum versions by committing changes to GitHub and clicking a single "Approve" button.
• [x] Configure a new database server and EBS volume (for image uploads, etc.) on the new AWS account.
• [x] Configure a new server which automatically applies security updates, attaches the EBS volume and registers itself with ECS on startup.
• [x] Set up Route53 DNS records on the new AWS account.
• [x] Point the domain at the new Route53 DNS setup.
• [x] Put the current site into "maintenance" mode, with a message pointing here.
• [x] Copy over the database(s), making sure to convert them from MyISAM to InnoDB (#16), so that backups will actually work reliably. We like backups.
• [x] Copy over the files.
• [x] New: Deal with bizarre DNS issue. Of course.
• [x] ARGGGH! Git submodules and CodePipeline don't play nicely! Oh, yuck. The terrible evil things I do for this forum.
• [x] Restart the phpbb container.
• [x] Test the site on a test domain.
• [x] Turn off maintenance mode on the new site.
• [x] Fix failure to see forum data volume after reboot.
• [x] Update various DNS records.
• [x] Update announcement on old site to tell people their DNS is stale and they may need to wait a bit or reboot.

We're back online! If you're still seeing the old forum with the message about maintenance, your DNS records are out of date. Try the following:

1. Restart your browser.
2. Reboot your computer.
3. Wait from an hour to 2 days, depending on how awful your ISP's DNS cache is. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes for you to see the new site, but some DNS servers are badly configured.

Once this is done, we can work on:

• The blog (#22).
• A Docker-aware reverse proxy so we can easily host multiple subdomains on a single server without paying $21/month for a load balancer (#20).
• Get the SuperChallenge bot back online (#21).

[rdearman]

Might want to think about having a dedicated email server as a docker app. https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver

[emk]

Good idea! Let's discuss that under issue #17.

[emk]

Sigh. My testing wasn't as good as I thought it was. We really need a "staging" environment, a server which looks just like the real one, and which allows us to test everything in a real environment before users see it.

Anyway, I am currently dealing with horrors that humankind was never meant to know (subtype: terrible things done with git plumbing commands in the middle of a migration that didn't go as planned).

[emk]

And we're back! Yay!