Phew. What a fucking nightmare.
So, up until very recently, interconnected.org (plus about six or seven websites, webmail, and a few people's email) lived on a box called historicalfact. HF was (is) old. It's been used in a college computer room for about three years because I picked it up for a bargain 50 of your Earth pounds, slapped Red Hat on it and got to business. But that 200Mhz Pentium 2 started creaking, after not so very long at all. In fact, it started getting pretty bloody awful. Mean time between failures was about a week, and that's the kind of failure where I have to phone up the guys whose office I of which I use the cupboard it is, and ask them to power cycle. Nasty. Anyway, time between failures has started dropped. In fact, HF died for several hours for the last two nights.
Luckily, I've had a brand spanking new server ready (well, kind of). I've spent today at work with a window open in the background, using it to pull stuff over from the old box, spending lunch frantically getting email, IMAP, majordomo, Apache and all the other basics up and running. And here we are: new box. FreeBSD, 1Ghz Pentium III, and it's a noticable different. Dirk finds paths between nodes an order of magnitude faster, and picking up my email no longer results in time outs for the various websites. Of course, not everything's working yet so don't be surprised if there are a few rough edges. I'll be sorting things out over the weekend. But here I am. Hello.
(Incidentally, it seems that catastophic failures to me occur only when there's a fallback alternative nearly available. The first version of Dirk finally hit that low-probability file conflict and broke its data file just when I was at a position to switch over to MySQL, to the day. Most odd.)
Phew. What a fucking nightmare.
So, up until very recently, interconnected.org (plus about six or seven websites, webmail, and a few people's email) lived on a box called historicalfact. HF was (is) old. It's been used in a college computer room for about three years because I picked it up for a bargain 50 of your Earth pounds, slapped Red Hat on it and got to business. But that 200Mhz Pentium 2 started creaking, after not so very long at all. In fact, it started getting pretty bloody awful. Mean time between failures was about a week, and that's the kind of failure where I have to phone up the guys whose office I of which I use the cupboard it is, and ask them to power cycle. Nasty. Anyway, time between failures has started dropped. In fact, HF died for several hours for the last two nights.
Luckily, I've had a brand spanking new server ready (well, kind of). I've spent today at work with a window open in the background, using it to pull stuff over from the old box, spending lunch frantically getting email, IMAP, majordomo, Apache and all the other basics up and running. And here we are: new box. FreeBSD, 1Ghz Pentium III, and it's a noticable different. Dirk finds paths between nodes an order of magnitude faster, and picking up my email no longer results in time outs for the various websites. Of course, not everything's working yet so don't be surprised if there are a few rough edges. I'll be sorting things out over the weekend. But here I am. Hello.
(Incidentally, it seems that catastophic failures to me occur only when there's a fallback alternative nearly available. The first version of Dirk finally hit that low-probability file conflict and broke its data file just when I was at a position to switch over to MySQL, to the day. Most odd.)