What's going on? - Server Upgrade

[patracy]

Folks, we've been limping along on a 7+ year old server these days. As many of you know, there's been numerous outages. (Due to hardware crashes, power loss, network outages, and kernel panics) It's been very painful at times to say the least.

I'm happy to announce that we're moving to a virtualized server though to rid ourselves of hardware issues!

What does this mean?

To simplify things, instead of us owning a dated piece of hardware. We're going to have our server reside inside another server. (Our hosting company will be responsible for that hardware) The Steel Soldiers server will "live inside a server" if you will.

Moving to a virtual host should get us away from hardware we have to support. And allow us to freely migrate to other VM hosts as needed.

Our current status is this:
The new VM server is up and running, I've got the webserver up and running. I also have the database server and a few other supporting functions installed and humming.

I began trying to copy over the massive amounts of data this morning from our server. But as many might have noticed, the current server was brought to it's knees.

So I'm going to have to backup and punt on this one. I was hoping I could do everything in the background with low impact (outage). But it appears I'm going to have to shut down the site while I do this work. I suspect I'm looking at a solid day worth of work. Also the migration will cause the server IP to change. This will need time for DNS to update to everyone's computer. (Unless I can get our hosting company to do a little trickery with the IP)

During the downtime, I'll probably just have the current server setup to display the maintenance screen with a link to the offsite chatroom.

I do not have dates on when I'll be doing this yet. But I'm going to reach out to Chris to see what's acceptable to him based on my work schedule.

Thanks everyone, please bear with us until we get through this hurdle.

Drew

 

[Adxavier06]

Will this change allow guys using the tapatalk app to post pics straight from a mobile device? Because within the last week I haven't been able to post pics using the tapatalk app like I have before. Just curious.

 

[patracy]

Will this change allow guys using the tapatalk app to post pics straight from a mobile device? Because within the last week I haven't been able to post pics using the tapatalk app like I have before. Just curious.

The tapatalk software was upgraded recently. I know from the applications perspective, they've changed a few things. Within tapatalk you'll need to change a setting for image sharing. You need to select upload as attachment in tapatalk.

 

[Adxavier06]

The tapatalk software was upgraded recently. I know from the applications perspective, they've changed a few things. Within tapatalk you'll need to change a setting for image sharing. You need to select upload as attachment in tapatalk.

Ok thanks alot!

 

[swbradley1]

If the provider is big enough and VM is placed in the correct environment, the server (the virtual one) will almost never fail.

That's one thing I like about our VM environment, if the host (actual hardware server) dies our virtual servers get moved to another running host instantly, even all the network connections and the world just continues on.

The only downside is that you need someone to notice the first one failed so it can be fixed. You would think that would never happen but it does.

 

[zout]

And here I thought ya all bought one of them fancy swivel electrical sockets that let you hide all the cords behind your computer equipment so you can get your desk close to the wall - like ya see sold on TV. Guess not huh.

 

[Adxavier06]

And here I thought ya all bought one of them fancy swivel electrical sockets that let you hide all the cords behind your computer equipment so you can get your desk close to the wall - like ya see sold on TV. Guess not huh.

Lol same here

 

[EMD567]

What ever it takes. I will just buy a bigger bottle of crown.........

 

[patracy]

Ok, I'm trying a little different approach this AM. We'll see where it gets us...

 

[patracy]

Ugh, ok, this is working too slowly. (30mins in, 0% transfered, still calculating) Back to the drawing board.

 

[glassk]

clonezilla

 

[patracy]

Disk cloning isn't an option here. (Nor do I want trash on the new server, which there's currently a lot of...)

 

[uscgmatt]

Sir, you do whatever is needed to migrate the server. If its down for a day or 2, well that's 2 days of getting stuff done as opposed to sitting here on the computer.

 

[glassk]

just playing, Thanks for all the unseen tasks it takes to keep this site running.

 

[patracy]

Well I'm back to scp'ing things over. Right now I'm letting her run wide open. CPU utilization is ok. We currently have 54gigs worth of attachments to migrate over. That's only the attachments people have uploaded. Nothing in the database has even been touched yet.

 

[swbradley1]

Oh, so that explains the slow response at about 22:04 and a duplicate post someone made. Probably didn't wait long enough.

 

[patracy]

Oh, so that explains the slow response at about 22:04 and a duplicate post someone made. Probably didn't wait long enough.

Yeah, we started to get bottle necked a bit more, so I halted the process. I've restarted it as a background process now. Guess I should just leave it alone for now. This probably will take a day or so.

 

[patracy]

Just an update. We've currently got 54gigs of attachments on the site. I have so far transferred 46gigs of it. Hopefully this will finish tomorrow. Then it's a few more file systems to copy over. Setup rsync to grab new files as uploaded on the server. Then I'll be taking the site down long enough to run backups of the databases and moving them over. Once that's done, I'll work out all the details on the sever and get it fully functional. Once that's done, we'll have a final downtime where I'll grab new copies of the databases, flip DNS, wait for a bit for the internet to "catch up". Then we'll be back live.

Still a lot more to go. But I'm working on it!

 

[o1951]

. Once that's done, I'll work out all the details on the sever and get it fully functional.
Still a lot more to go. But I'm working on it!

Watch them severs, they have a wicked a bite.

 

[papabear]

Just an update. We've currently got 54gigs of attachments on the site. I have so far transferred 46gigs of it. Hopefully this will finish tomorrow. Then it's a few more file systems to copy over. Setup rsync to grab new files as uploaded on the server. Then I'll be taking the site down long enough to run backups of the databases and moving them over. Once that's done, I'll work out all the details on the sever and get it fully functional. Once that's done, we'll have a final downtime where I'll grab new copies of the databases, flip DNS, wait for a bit for the internet to "catch up". Then we'll be back live.
Still a lot more to go. But I'm working on it!

That's exactly what I would do!! Thanks for keeping us going Sir!