C-Brat Site Outage - Server Update Coming

Da Nag

Administrator
Staff member
C-Brats,

I've acquired a dedicated server, and am in the process of testing a migration of the C-Brats over to it. Once complete, we should have a far more stable platform, with fewer outages, and more consistent performance.

I don't expect any problems, but during the migration, the C-Brat site will be unavailable. If you attempt to access the site during the migration process, you'll see a note indicating the site is unavailable - try back in an hour or so.

I'm not 100% sure when the migration will take place, but it will be sometime in the next 7-10 days.
 
I will be gone most of next week starting Monday, so I probably will not be missing anything if it is down for awhile.

What size of server did you get? OS, HD capacity, memory, processor, ect?

________
Dave dlt.gif
 
oldgrowth":103sp4d5 said:
What size of server did you get? OS, HD capacity, memory, processor, ect?

Nothing too crazy...P4 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 2x80GB drives (RAID1). Plenty enough for the volume of traffic it will be serving.

More importantly...unlike our current shared hosting environment, nothing goes on the server unless I put it there.
 
Bill - it sounds exciting. Is this something that you can do at home or another location of your choice or do you have to have the server at a special or particular location?

________
Dave dlt.gif
 
oldgrowth":2zld3nce said:
Bill - it sounds exciting. Is this something that you can do at home or another location of your choice or do you have to have the server at a special or particular location?

Having done systems work for a while, I long ago committed to never doing anything, that couldn't be remotely managed 100%. At my day job, I'll install a new server in a rack, after which it's not uncommon for me to never physically visit it again until it's removed from service 4 years later.

The new server physically resides in Atlanta. Obviously, I can't handle a hardware failure from across the country, but I can monitor for them...and if/when it happens, that's what service contracts are for.

In the event of a hardware failure, there's a whole slew of techs sitting in the Atlanta data center who swap things out. In the event something happens to the data on the server, I can handle restores remotely. If something renders the server completely unusable, they can reinstall a minimal OS, usually in under an hour. From there, I can restore most things to a known good state in another hour or so - from anywhere.

There's nothing that fancy about the above...just typical UNIX/Linux systems administration, routinely handled by nerds the world over... :tux
 
Bill;
Thanks for for the heads up and all the time/work you put into this site. It is the most professional site I have had the privilege to be on.
 
Bill,

Thanks for the warning. Since most of my time on here is pretty late in the day and I'm guessing you would be doing your "thing" at a more civilized hour, I will probably not notice the down time. There has been a bug going around and I seem to have caught it. I believe Catman coined the term "C-diction". It appears that if caught in time a cure can be had by either time on the water, or, a C-Brat fix, and a short delay of an hour or so should not be fatal.

And thanks for all you do for this site. You are appreciated.

Harvey
Sleepy C :moon
 
Bill...I would like to second what Sea Angel said. Your time is very much appreciated and this is an excellent web site! :smiled

John
 
Well folks...if you are reading this, you are seeing the site on the new server.

Follow up here with any problem reports.
 
edwardf":1q9oz4g4 said:
Looking good so far. I, like oldgrowth, am curious about the site.

Debian? phpBB2 ?

Yes and yes. Debian is stable (Etch), phpBB2 is still 2.x.

I've no plans to upgrade phpBB2 to 3.x...I'm hoping to migrate to something completely different, perhaps Drupal. But that's a hairy conversion, and a bunch more work than a server move...won't happen any time soon.
 
Da Nag: Problem !!!!!
I have hit the events for all three that I am on the roster of.... three times each. I have clicked my heels 3 times too.... and I am still upstairs in my office instead of at the gatherings. :mrgreen:

Now if you can fix that... I would appreciate it.
:thup :smiled :teeth

Well... like the others ... I do truly appreciate your time and work Brother. Hope to see ya again soon.

Byrdman
 
sportner":23wcvi30 said:
I was posting pictures slowly last night before the migration, but today I'm having trouble. Is it me or the new server??

The albums should be working as well (or as poorly) as they did before...unfortunately, they're quite the hack, and are based on some pretty old code that I can't easily upgrade. That being said...I just uploaded a couple images without problem. Are you seeing errors, or does the upload process just run forever?

It definitely helps things if you resize pictures first - maximum size is 800x600 pixels. You can upload larger images, and the software will resize things - but that is where most of the problems manifest that I've seen.
 
Hi Bill,

Thanks for all the work you do!

Now for my problem. Every time I go to a topic thread, when I return I get the Warning: Page has Expired '. Then I have to hit the refresh and retry buttons to get back to the list of topics.

Is this some setting on my PC? It just started today.

Thanks,
Steve
 
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