Server move (10/10 & 10/11/09)

Just a heads up to everyone that there will be a server move within the next week or two. They are building my new one right now.

The hard drive space has been hitting 87 percent full lately, and it's just time to get fresh components anyway. Bigger, faster, and hopefully BETTER. The RAID 0 SAS 300gb drives should hold us for a while, and the 12gb of main RAM should help a lot.

But of course these things are never painless. I have to figure out the install procedure for the chat again, so that will likely be down for a while for the duration.

I'll try to give you all as much notice as I can, but I'm up against a timeline to try to get this done before the bills are due on the two servers I am going to consolidate into the new one. Yeah, I've got to tighten the belt too these days.

This move may take place in the next couple of days. Had a LOT of problems getting the first one running with the configuration I wanted (I'm going kind of radical with the hard drives!) so they had to switch to a different data center for some reason.

So I'm told it is running at the new data center and they just have a few more things to do before they hand it over to me. Well, more accurately, my server guy.

I'm not sure how much warning I can give you before this site has to go asleep for several hours, but I'll do the best I can. This is a BIG site, so the transfer may take quite a while. In any event, chat will be down for a while, because I need to find my notes on reinstalling it. That reinstall is a real pain in the butt to do. Maybe I'll check to see if they have an upgrade available to streamline that process. Lord knows I've yelped at the developer enough about it.....

GOOD. Dont get any new chat! We love our chat as is!!! LOLOL ( upgrades are fine!)

har har

Its the best chat out there IMHO ( which is also why it is so expensive!)

Those of us who are "chat die hards" will have a rough time with out each other LOL but, what ever will keep this site on top, I will support.

I would be bald if I had all of the head aches that you have endured over the years. Thanx for giving us the best place in cyber space to hang out Rich!

Good luck with the move. If you have problems integrating Real Chat let me know, I may be able to help...

If the server checks out OK with my tech, the move may begin as early as 1pm EST on Thursday, 10/08. He's figuring on about 24 hours to move everything from my first server to the new one.

Expect things to be broken afterwards. If things get TOO broken, I may just drive down to the beach and think pleasant retirement thoughts.... Might be time for me to resume drinking. I quit doing that when I stopped playing music, oh, 30 years ago. One of these days a server move is going to go SERIOUSLY wrong on me and lose stuff. It's just a matter of time.

Hopefully this new one will hold out for a while. I counted 16 processors when I checked the server stats a little bit ago. 12gb of RAM, and three 300gb 15K rpm SAS drives. Still, this will probably be obsolete in less than 2 years. Or else the hard drives will be filled up. Traffic is definitely increasing here at a steady pace. Which, of course, is a double edged sword.....

Got word from my server guy that the domain moves to the new server will take place either later today or early tomorrow. I'll be shutting down this site right before the database move needs to happen. Sorry, I won't have very much warning myself, so this is about as much warning as you are going to get about it. Any emails to me asking what has happened will be ignored, as I am going to be out of town most of tomorrow (Saturday) anyway.

Try to make any posts you make short and sweet so you don't lose them if I shut down the forum while you are composing your words.

Sorry, there is really no completely pleasant way to do this....

Well, I thought this was going to take place yesterday and today, but my server guy apparently fell off the face of the earth.

You know, I hear people bitching and moaning about the economy these days, yet this kind of crap seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

OK, we're back, finally. Sort of. Chat is down and some of the later image attachments that were made between the site being copied over and the time when the database was refreshed haven't been copied. I'm hoping just copying over those missed files will fix that, but maybe not. If not, the red "X"s will just have to be found and the links deleted in the threads.

Not sure when chat will be back as I believe the IP address was hard coded into the script and one or two ports need to be opened for it.

Might be some other fanged problems lurking that haven't surfaced yet, so be on your toes. I was up till past 4am and my server guy was up later than that working on this.

Man I hate server moves. They really stress me out. But at least I'm not doing hosting for other people any longer. That was MUCH worse being responsible for other people's sites.

Anyway, if you notice something odd going on with this site, please let me know so I can take a look at it. The sooner the better, because that old server isn't going to be available much longer, so anything still on it that is needed, NEEDS to get captured REAL SOON.

Hmm, looks like spell check isn't working....