Neverside

Planned downtime for server upgrade

As I've finally discovered how to get NS working under PHP 5, I will be backing up the server and installing the latest OS and software within the next several days (up until now I have been stuck with some older versions since NS did not work with PHP 5).

I'm not certain what day this will be, but I wanted to let everyone know so you will be aware of why the site is down.

Thanks!

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

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It's said EE-SAW-MOO


I'll speak slowly if your on something, and faster if your not.

An update

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Free Desktop Wallpapers

:O Front page news update!

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Won't be upgrading tonight (though maybe this weekend some time), but there "will" be some downtime tonight, as I've ordered a new secondary SATA II drive to be added for nightly backups with rsync. Once the site is more active in the future I'll also add an off-site backup solution for data redundancy. For the internal backup, I hope to mirror the full drive nightly and create a bootable copy of the main drive in case there's ever a drive failure (e.g. only a few hours downtime versus days). I can't yet afford RAID, but maybe some day.

So far as the OS update, I've been investigating whether to stick with 64 bit CentOS, or go to 32 bit (as I've had some degree of difficulty installing things on 64 bit in the past. I'm leaning towards staying with 64 bit anyhow though, since CentOS 5 already has most of what I need (less to install manually) and also it will be possible to add 4+ GB of RAM when the time comes (have 2GB right now... I'm planning to use memcached paired with Drupal Memcache API though in the future which will take a lot of RAM). I'm going to test-install it on OS X to see its effectiveness first. I also noticed that FreeBSD 7 came out recently, and that's tempting me haha. If anyone has feedback on 32/64bit or CentOS versus FreeBSD 7, I'm all ears

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Last edited by AbsoluteCross, June 14th, 2008 01:38 AM (Edited 1 times)

New hard drive install is complete.
OS reinstall may be this weekend sometime.

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Upgrades complete. Downtime was a bit longer than expected, since my OS reload panel told me it would take only 45 minutes to complete, but ended up taking over 2 hours. At that point I stayed up the rest of the night to get things as squared away as possible (setting up sites and securing the server), but missed a few things on some sites in my exhaustion haha :P Let me know if you locate any bugs or issues.

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Update:

There will be another instance of downtime sometime this week as I'm getting a deal to get an extra 2GB of RAM for free

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

schweet

For the same price as before ($179), the server's specs are now essentially doubled (already had the drives and bandwidth though, and the quad core was a happy accident due to inventory at the time of order, so not a standard/repeatable deal):

Intel Xeon 3220-Quad Core 2.4GHz
4GB RAM
250GB SATA II drives (x2)
2TB/mo transfer

This ought to last a good long while My next future upgrade will likely be RAID, but not until it's needed (e.g. enough constant new data to make daily backups insufficient).

If anyone is looking for a great unmanaged dedicated server company, I highly recommend SoftLayer. Be sure to keep an eye on their special deals page. At the moment they have free double RAM and hard drive or free 20GB EVault - recently they've also offered free control panel licenses. Their servers are self-managed, however they offer good support and also a nice $3-per-issue service to have them handle more complex issues when needed.

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com