5-23-2010 Server Hardware Upgrade (now complete)

[Jeff]

In the next 24 hours, you may notice a few blips in connectivity on Sunday evening / early Monday morning as this webserver will be upgraded during this window from a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS on a new Nehalem-generation server. Also the current U320 10k SCSI hard drives will be upgraded to 15k SAS drives. And an Intel X25-E SSD will handle a couple of the high IOPs areas which should be nice during peak times. Although it's taken a lot longer than expected, this is the first stage of the 2010 upgrades.

[Jeff]

The forum is now running on the new server. A little bit of tuning is still going on regarding sql wait values and similar, so if you encounter any new issues please email webmaster@boatdesign.net or post them here. Thanks for your patience during this upgrade.

[waikikin]

Hi Jeff, I'm having trouble uploading some photos to the gallery & previously this worked ok, could this be related to the upgrade? All the best from Jeff & thanks for the forum.

[Jeff]

I got one other report from a member experiencing an error uploading to the gallery yesterday but haven't been able to reproduce it yet. I made one change which might fix it but it would be easier if I was seeing the error for myself. Could you give it another try, and if you are still seeing the error, could you please email the file you were uploading when the error happened to webmaster@boatdesign.net
Thanks very much.

[waikikin]

Thanks Jeff, seems to work fine today All the best from Jeff.

[marshmat]

That's some serious hardware, Jeff. The site definitely feels a bit faster during peak times this week.
If you don't mind us asking, where's the money coming from to pay for that kind of hosting equipment? This place is, after all, still pretty much ad-free....

[Jeff]

Thanks very much Matt. Upgrading is always a bit tedious, but it's fun to see how much faster the new cpus are than those a generation back. I had also been clinging to the apache 1.3.x that has been rock solid for years and years and years, so I took this opportunity to take the leap to 2.2.x as well. As far as covering the costs, currently costs are covered by the sponsors of our original directory section and by showing ads to unregistered guests. I thought long and hard about this and initially resisted any advertising, but I am happy with this solution which has been in place for a while now. The forums are free of advertising for members who contribute knowledge and their time so we're not forcing ads on anyone and it's fully optional (even if you don't want to post, if you want to opt out of ads, you can simply create a username.) At the same time, there are a good number of unregistered guests at any moment who come to read this or that thread, sometimes for specific information as they search a solution to a specific similar problem and other times just browsing around. These seem the ideal candidate for the subtle ad which might be of interest as they browse around. So far it has worked out really well with the costs covered by those who come to read a few things and "use" the site in that way but without any cost or bother to those who contribute knowledge and their time to the community.

[Jeff]

Originally Posted by waikikin

Thanks Jeff, seems to work fine today All the best from Jeff.

Excellent. Sorry again for my initial oversight. Sometimes it's the simplest things that get you. (in this case the gallery has its own temporary upload space where the uploaded files are staged in a number of subdirectories and I had incorrectly set permissions on some of those subdirectories after cloning over from the old server.)