The site was offline from the day of the emergency alert, October 21, to October 25th. The PHP updates were issued earlier in the day, and we updated the PHP software, and brought the overall web server up, but not the Indymedia site.

The IMC software, written in 1999 and the early 2000s, was out of date, and needed some changes before it could be run on the new PHP.

The site had been running on old copies of PHP5 and PHP7, years and decades out of date, and only patched occasionally. This was enabled by using a web server to deliver different URLs to different backend servers. Updating those didn't look too promising. Old versions of the operating system software were no longer online (at least not easily accessed), and getting matching PHP with patches wasn't looking too easy.

2026, however, isn't 2005 or 2015. We now have LLMs and coding agents. We also had a partial port of the old software to use more modern programming styles (OOP, which isn't modern anymore). So I went ahead and used the LLM to update the code, piecemeal, to work with PHP8. (It wasn't like in the movies, It took four long days.)

It felt like doing half a year of work in four days.

The deployment took most of a day, mainly because I was copypasting configs, and had to learn how to tweak them. Migrating the database was slow, too. Backups are still being performed.

The main tool I used was Thaura.ai - a fantastic tool. I'm never sure what model they're using, but their website says GLM. I've heard they're on Qwen. Other tools I used were one of the Nemotrons, and Big Pickle in OpenCode.

So we're back, and I hope set up to continue migrating the software to be more manageable.

-fried