Equipment upgrades this week, expect some down time

[Steve St.Laurent]

I'm down here in Atlanta (got here friday) installing new equipment for the site. Today I had I had the site down for approximately 10 minutes while I was making some changes to the network. I'll be working on the servers all week and there will be some periods of down time. I'm going to do my best to keep the down time isolated to the hours of 1am-7am eastern time and hopefully there will only be one night of extended down time. I'll make an announcement that day to warn you guys.



Things are going well so far. Today I got things to the point that I was hoping to be at tomorrow night so I'm about a day ahead of schedule right now. The servers and the load balancer are in place at the facility and now I'm configuring them. Some of you may find this interesting (geeks?) - here's a picture of our equipment as it sits right now. Everything above the UPS is new equipment. This will allow us to handle significantly more traffic than we can handle now and can easily grow to handle insane amounts of traffic (just add more of those 1u IBM servers). Once everything is up and running you guys will be connecting to the site on either one of the web servers (with more added as needed) but it will be completely seamless to you. It also will make things far more fault tolerant. I'll be able to work on a server and take it off line and it will be completely transparent to you with no down time.



This is a significant step in the evolution of the website. I appreciate your patience and apologize for any down time that is necessary during this transition.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[WTBurke]

You're AWESOME Stevy





William

 

[bighornram]

- here's a picture of our equipment as it sits right now.

Can't seem to access the photo. Sounds like a sweet setup.

 

[DieselDoghouse]

MORE POWER!!! ARR! ARR! ARR! Great Job, hope all connects well!!

 

[JApol]

A BOMBed website full of BOMBed trucks

 

[Whiskey]

Can't see the picture!!

whiskey

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

The pictures updated, let me know if you can't see it now.

 

[Nate]

I'm glad you know how to work those things. Just looks like a pile of steel and plastic to me :-laf

 

[redram3]

Hi steve Off topic: Just wonderd why Wwhen I try to acess your web page i get a message that I;am forbiden. Thanks John

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Because it was on a previous ISP I was using and I forgot to update the link. It's working now.

 

[MYeary]

Keep up the good work Steve, Oo.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

BTW, did anyone notice that we hit a new user record on the 4th - 3322 users online!

 

[Tomeygun]

I'm down here in Atlanta (got here friday) installing new equipment for the site. Today I had I had the site down for approximately 10 minutes while I was making some changes to the network. ... ... ... ... ... .

This is a significant step in the evolution of the website. I appreciate your patience and apologize for any down time that is necessary during this transition.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

Thats why you'da'man -- You keep the site zipping along like nothing. But in reality there is tons of work to keep it all together - And thanks to you for that!

 

[PToombs]

BTW, did anyone notice that we hit a new user record on the 4th - 3322 users online!

Yeah, I noticed, I went off about an hour before. :{ I saw the new record the next evening! Everbody luvs the TDR!

Keep up the good work Steve! Oo.

 

[ToolManTimTaylor]

MORE POWER!!! ARR! ARR! ARR!

LOL@ DDH. BTW that's My line :-laf



God's Circuits Steve!

 

[CogginsP]

1am to 7am?! what about us overseas guys?! i won't be able to keep up with the web-site!!!



Just kidding, keep up the great work Steve! Not sure what I am going to do with my time when the TDR is down... I think I will be lost???

 

[Joe Mc]

Alright Steve!!! Does this mean there's a chance we'll be able to have the fancy little Avatars again, as in the days of yore? Just wondering - I kind of miss being able to recognize folks quickly by their Avatar.



Thanks for all you do to make this site as great as it is and work as well as it does. And, helping me understand how not to recreate the "user errors" I always seem miss.

 

[DBF]

Great work, Steve. Thanks for configuring to keep the response time so fast. There's nothing more frustrating than to hit an enter key and have (apparently) nothing happen.



Regards, DBF

 

[formula]

Itanium?



Sean

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

2 dual core xeon's in each of the 2 web servers + the primary database server. The backup database/development server is dual AMD Athlon 1. 9's. The beauty of the system will have in place when this is done is that we can add additional lower cost servers and have much better performance for the $ than spending mega bucks on a fast individual server. Everything should be up and running by wednesday morning. Looks like the down time will be tuesday night/wednesday morning.