Mastodon.nl upgraded to latest release 3.5.3

Like most of the fediverse, the sudden influx of users came as somewhat as a surprise. Last weekend we barely kept the system responsive by extensive live system tuning. Just after the weekend Maarten was interviewed by a national newspaper. So it was decided to move to a larger VPS plan doubling our resources.

With that out of the way, it was time to update the mastodon software. The server has been receiving regular OS updates continuously, but updating the mastodon application stack requires some manual intervention and checking at this time.

So this morning I took the time to determine the steps we needed to take to get to the latest stable release. To get to the latest release two components needed upgrades prior to updating Mastodon itself. The elasticsearch needed to be upgraded from 6.x to 7.x. And our ruby was at 2.6 and needed to move release 3.0.3

Then I upgraded the software to release 3.5.2 and ran all the database migrations. When that all turned out OK, the release was updated to 3.5.3 and the assets were recompiled.

All in all there were very few issues running the upgrade. And by making a disk snapshot pre upgrade, making untested changes to the system was not too risky.

Now I can't wait for Mastodon 4.x to become stable :-)