Whenever there’s a new Discourse release I get an email about the upgrade, and I use a built-in UI to perform the upgrade. Most of the time this works, but occasionally it fails, as it did today.
Discourse regularly downloads a GeoIp database, but due the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) these direct downloads are no longer availble, which causes the whole build to fail.
See Maxmind announcement and Discourse thread.
It seems like this is fixed in Discourse now, it will use a potentially stale DB or you set a license key and it will use that for the download, but this will require a manual pull-latest-version-and-rebuild which will lead to some downtime and may need some manual shepherding.
I don’t have the bandwidth for this at the moment, but I’m happy to provide access and some pointers to someone who wants to take a stab at this. It might not be a lot of work. Please raise your hand if you want to give it a go. If not we’ll be running on an outdated version for a while.
Thanks!