Category: websrv02

Scheduled Server Migration Notice

Posted on by Matt Simpson

The time has come once again for server hardware migration. The current hardware on websrv02 has served us well over the years but the warranty is now up and it’s time to move to bigger and better hardware. The new server I have purchased sports x4 2.13GHz Intel CPU’s, 24 GB of RAM, and 1TB of RAID 1 disk, it’s also running the latest and greatest version of Plesk, as well as Apache 2.2, PHP 5.4, and MySQL 5.5. It has also been running for a few months now to ensure stability prior to actually migrating customers over.

The migration to the new server will begin this week, and I will contact you individually to let you know what day over the next 2 weeks I will migrate your account. Migrations will take place in the evenings, and do not require much (if any) downtime. Essentially your account is migrated to the new server, and then deleted from the old server. Once it has been deleted from the old server, it will be live within a few minutes on the new one.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to give me a shout.

We’re All Together Again

Posted on by Matt Simpson

I was trying to think exactly when it was that I decided to split our DigitalOrphans website load into two servers… I believe it was in 2005 when I was teaching at St. Lawrence College, and the program coordinator asked me to provide web-hosting for all of the graphic design students. That experience of hosting websites for cohorts of graphic design students went on for about 5 years, and during that time I met a lot of very interesting and very talented designers. I still provide hosting services and keep in touch with many of these folks today.

It has been a few years now since I stopped hosting websites for entire cohorts of design students, and with that decrease in demand on server resources, and an increase in processing power on servers I am pleased to announce that I have now been able to merge us back onto one server again.

This move not only makes it easier for me to maintain the server, but also less expensive to run the service, which will translate into cheaper prices for some clients at their next regular billing cycle.

There are lots of things in the works right now, and I will be posting more exciting news in the weeks ahead.

As always, if you run into any issues or require any assistance please feel free to contact me.

 

websrv02 Scheduled Maintenance

Posted on by Matt Simpson

A brief reminder that we have a scheduled outage this evening of websrv02 so that maintenance can be performed on the server. We will be upgrading to Plesk 10.3, PHP 5.3, and also doing some operating system upgrades. Please expect intermittent outages over the next few hours as these upgrades are completed. I will be sure to post a tweet when they are finished.

Scheduled Replacement of websrv02 Hardware

Posted on by Matt Simpson

This is an important notice to inform websrv02 users that we will be replacing the websrv02 server hardware on Friday, February 19th, 2010. The current hardware is about four years old, and while it has not given us any problems we like to make sure our hardware is always in tip-top shape.

The websrv02 server will be unavailable for a short period of time while we shut the old system down and bring the new one online (approximately 20 minutes). This downtime is currently scheduled for:

Friday, February 19th, 2010 around 1:00PM EST

Important Website Warning: While the server downtime itself will be short, we will be starting the data transfer between the old server to the new server at approximately 10:45AM. It is important that you *do not make any changes to your website* between 10:30AM and 2:00PM EST on Friday or your changes may be lost once the new server is brought online.

Important E-Mail Warning: We will be shutting down incoming mail service on websrv02 at approximately 11:00AM EST to prevent any e-mail loss. If someone attempts to send you an e-mail on Friday between 11:00AM and 1:00PM EST the message will stay in their servers mail queue and will automatically resend once the mail service on the new server is brought online again.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause; however we feel that this is an important upgrade to ensure the long term quality of service you have come to expect.

Unscheduled websrv02 Downtime

Posted on by Matt Simpson

A quick post to let you know that as of 10:55AM today websrv02 is currently off-line, and we are currently investigating the issue. At this time it appears as though the power port the server is plugged into at our data center has malfunctioned, but we are confirming this now with the network administrators. I will update this post as new information becomes available.

Update 12:01PM
We have confirmed that the problem is an issue with the APC power unit that all servers in this particular rack are connected to. Our network administrators are working at installing a new APC power unit as we speak, and the issue should be resolved very shortly.

Update 1:50PM
I have just received another update from our network administrators stating that they are now replacing the switch that connects all of the servers on the rack. They have informed me that it should be operational again shortly.

Update 2:10PM
Service has now been fully restored. If you have any issues, please feel free to let me know. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.