Friday, June 20, 2003
Abrupt move
Since March 3rd, 1999, tower has been in service as a
web and email server for a few sites. At some point in late 2000/eary 2001
we moved tower down to DialTone Internet (our friend Chris allowed us to
colocate with his server; in return we would help run his machine). Fast
pipes, good power, no real problems. The only complaint I ever had with
DialTone was their rather paranoid policies towards security; getting in to
service the machines is a painful process, but security is a tradeoff with
convenience and it's not like we have to go down there all that often.
But over time the number of sites has slowly increased, as well as the amount of email it's processing, but it's becoming apparent that it is slowly reaching the end of its useful life as a colocated server.
It's still running:
[spc]tower:~>uptime 5:16pm up 441 days, 17:29, 2 users, load average: 0.38, 0.68, 0.63 [spc]tower:~>
And there are projects that Mark and I would like to do that
tower cannot handle; it is, after all, a 33MHz 486 based
machine:
[spc]tower:~>more /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 486 model : 486 SX vendor_id : GenuineIntel stepping : 3 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : no fpu_exception : no cpuid : yes wp : yes flags : vme bogomips : 16.59
For the past six months or so, Mark and I have been in discussion about
what system we wanted to replace tower and where to host the
replacement server. At one point we almost had a replacement system but
that fell through. Now though, we have one system pretty much ready to go,
with another one that will be at our disposal Real Soon Now (woo hoo! Load
balancing, redundancy, mirroring, here we come!). And we've found a new
colocation facility, since DialTone has been planning on moving and we would
prefer a local facility in case we need to service the machine.
We were planning on a smooth transition to the new server(s) and we were pretty much on track and probably would have been doing this in a week or two.
Until today.
That's when Mark found out that DialTone no longer wants colocation customers and we have until Monday to move our server.
Well.
Love the advanced warning there. A whole weekend to locate, negotiate and move a server to new facilities.
Good thing Mark and I have been planning this anyway (okay, DialTone stopped taking new colocation customers shortly after we moved in, and the impending move prompted us to start locating a local company anyway) but the short notice is rather abrupt though.
More details as things fall into place …
