[Richard T. Eger]

Dear Ed,

Some, like Ruy, said it wasn't really all that difficult to do. My son, who is used to working in Unix code, elected to go into the guts of the thing and I just watched dumbfounded, acknowledging his actions, but not having the knowledge he had to pop in whatever he needed. There were things like secure shell client; $ signs in abundance; ls, meaning list files and directories; cd, meaning change directory; grep, meaning look for a specific string within files and print out matching lines - just all sorts of stuff a computer geek would know and I would not. Going the route he had taken was simply way above my pay grade, as Obama would say.

In the end, he said it went far more smoothly than he had expected. When one is dealing with the unknown, as all three of us were, we didn't want to botch the job by failing to protect as much as possible against the unknown. To assist, I had bought the only book available on vBulletin and, before that, on cPanel. I can't remember how many different passwords we had to pump in as we went about the transition, but it was a bunch. Both books looked simple, but then threw code at me and I was a goner. It is also one thing to say do "X", yet another to know just where and how to do it.

We had to first lock out the site, much as Ruy had done with TOCH!. Then we had to back up the site just in case - first the database, then the software. We struggled to determine exactly what the proper code for the database was. Magic fingers working under the hood eventually determined what that was.

The Admin panel seemed to have a simple instruction, just press here to download the latest version of the vBulletin software, but to where and, once there, then what? Oh, we'll just download to my computer, my son says, so down it came. So here comes the Zip file. Should we open it? No, we'll just FTP it to the server. Uh, but my old FTP program had given up the ghost. So, he again handles that with yet another Unix code program, as I just stare. But how do we unzip it once there? Oh, no problem says the wizard. Now, he says let's just be sure what we have with the old version, so he goes to vBulletin and looks for that version and discovers we have the aforementioned 7400 additional lines of code that shouldn't be there. Should we do a cross comparison to go through the code? Oh, no, he does that far too much at Google and we are at an impass. Maybe a thousand lines, but definitely not 7400 lines. Eventually, Eureka strikes and he has an idea to see if the questionable code is important and we are back in the race. He sets up the second site as recommended, we make a quick visual check, all looks right with the world, and we press go and are done, deleting the old site.

I am so, so glad this is done!!! And, even better, he says to me if I need to do another update, just call. I think, by going through this, he realized I was completely out of my league.

Regards,
Richard