Upgrading (yet again)

Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, April 17th, 2011 - 8 comments
Categories: admin, notices, The Standard - Tags:

There will be a number of (hopefully) small disruptions over the next few days to upgrade the site servers. I am expecting to have a small disruption this evening at 2330, followed by up to an hours disruption on Sunday. Normally I’d do this in the wee hours of the morning. However I have some severe instructions from the lifesaver* that I may not do this in the future, so you’ll have to put up with disruptions :twisted:.

The end result will be an effective tripling of the current capacities. Hopefully that will keep us from having problems between now and the election.

* When was the last time you refreshed your CPR knowledge?

8 comments on “Upgrading (yet again) ”

  1. lprent 1

    That appears to be working and redirecting from the old server.

    You may find it slower than it will be where your cached DNS or that of your ISP is still caching the old IP so it is going to the old server and being told to get from the new server. 

    I’ll have to wait until the logging stops showing quite so much traffic on the old server before I get to the next phase.

    In the meantime, the search and the e-mail notification of comments will not be operating. Let me know about any other errors.

  2. lprent 2

    Bugger. The anti spam image is off. Fixing.

  3. lprent 3

    Fixed. Just had to install gd2 and freetype2

    Captcha: softwares – freaky

  4. lprent 4

    Damn. Looks like there is a problem in an external server that we link to. Probably the advertising server. Time to make sure that those defer until after all of the operational stuff.

  5. todd 5

    Hi Lprent, the feed bookmark doesn’t seem to be updating.

    • lprent 5.1

      Ok. Adding to the list. But I will leave it for a while. Some of the feed agents are cheerfully ignoring the updated DNS and the TTL. They’re pulling it from the old site *sigh*, which isn’t there until I reverse the replication and set the database read/write proxy up.

  6. r0b 6

    Hey Lynn.  What stage is the upgrade process at?  I’m certainly getting a much snappier response on all page loads than I’ve seen for many a month.  Good stuff!

    • lprent 6.1

      The basic upgrade is done. The system is mastered on the new server which is faster and has more cores than the old server. It is also local to the NZ network.

      The mail system still isn’t linked up (no contribute or e-mailing of comments) and the search isn’t on. Main reason is that some DNS’es at ISP’s didn’t flip in timely fashion. 

      Tonight I finish setuping the reversed system slaving the new server to the old server and direct everything from outside nz/aussie (ie most of the bots) to use the old server. Setup the search index there and reattach the mail system.

      At the end we should have two systems fully syncing with each other and it will take a mere software flip to shift from one to the other as being the master. Should hold us until after the election. I’ll upgrade the old server sometime over the next month or so as well. Should be able to double the cores for pretty much the same price.

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.