We have successfully migrated from Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 18, assuring stable and secure functioning of letYourMoneyGrow.com for the next several years. We had to disable social login but the users that registered with their social network accounts can use our services as before (they merely need to reset their passwords).
First of all I apologize for a relatively long time span without new posts. As a matter of fact I have recently had a concentration of events: I start my first project as a contractor and my computer has crashed (no, I did not lost any data ;)).
Additionally, there was an excellent opportunity to cheaply buy computers for a Maas-Cluster from JuRec-IT on Ebay and it took pretty much time to build a cluster.
So far I have built and checked the hardware part of my cluster. (Note the strong bolts on which the shelves are mounted, I learnt well from the previous case ;)).
But software part is still to be done: in particular the addition (commissioning) of the nodes via PXE-boot does not work seamlessly, at least so far.
Anyway, this cluster deserves several dedicated blog-posts, just be patient and let me run it and get some results 🙂
Anyway, I have a habit to try to turn even setbacks to opportunities. So the crash of my computer was a good reason to upgrade both hardware and software. As to hardware, I was pretty parsimonious: previously I got used to assemble pretty high-performance desktops (in particular in terms of GPUs) but indeed I need the top-notch performance really once or twice per quarter. What is, however, extremely important for me is to have several properly configured screens. I was even able to re-use my old video card Gygabite GeForce GTX 970, which supports up to 4 monitors.
A very pleasant surprise was that Ubuntu 18 Desktop finally supports nVIDIA multi-display settings as smoothly as Windows does.
Note, however, that you still need to install the proprietary NVIDIA software (see e.g. this manual).
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Another pleasant fact is that the Ubuntu update from 16 Xenial to 18 Bionic runs straightforwardly and smoothly on both Desktop and Server versions. For Ubuntu Desktop (with only "stardard" software installed) you really have to care about nothing, just launch the update and drink coffee.
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For the server on which letYourMoneyGrow.com runs it was a little bit more tricky, since we have some custom builds, in particular R and QuantLib. Additionally, we needed to overwrite Apache-configs in order to enable some advanced features like URL-rewrite.
Thus the update ran as follows:
0. Backup-backup-backup!
1. Read this esp. if you run a website on Digital Ocean like we do
2. Run sudo do-release-upgrade
3. Be careful when it asks you to overwrite configs, if doubt keep the previous version (which is also a default option)
4. After the installation is done, do NOT remove obsolete packages (unless you really have to). I suspect that if I would have done it, the R packages that we built from sources on Ubuntu 16 might have not worked properly.
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5. Test-test-test!
Testing letYourMoneyGrow.com features after the Linux upgrade we have found no problems except that the social login (with linkedIn) did not work anymore*. Most likely, this problem has nothing to do with the Linux update and took place before: as a matter of fact the social networks regularly update their APIs (also Facebook has recently announced to do this). But it is pretty time-consuming to follow all these updates and since all our services (except portfolio simulator and writing to forums) do not require registration, we decided to disable the social logins so far.
Members that have previously registered with their social network accounts can still login: just go to members and then click on "lost your password?"
If you still have troubles, do not hesitate to contact us.
And stay tuned: new posts and services will come soon!
*Additionally it tells now that WooCommerce Gateway PayPal Checkout requires cURL to be installed on your server, although we do have both core and PHP parts of cURL installed. But we can fix it later, since this will be acute only when we prepare a new stockpicking list.
Update 22.09.2018: This problem turns out to be a valuable hint: our webserver was still running on PHP7.0, whereas it is generally recommended to switch to PHP7.2
We did it as follows:
sudo apt-get purge php7.0 php7.0-common (if you do not want to remove PHP70 do instead: sudo a2dismod php7.0 )
sudo a2enmod php7.2
sudo service apache2 restart
FinViz - an advanced stock screener (both for technical and fundamental traders)
