ZylBlog

As Summer fades to Fall, and leaves drop from trees like crumbs from a crumpet, one begins to sit back in front of the fireplace and think: “OH SHOOT! I forgot to post the site updates!”

There is very little site news this month, I am not going to post the most commonly accessed pages since they have not changed since last month.

There were no significant outages (outages over ten minutes) this month. The new server is holding steady. Increased demand will shortly cause problems due to lack of RAM — this will hopefully be resolved soon.

IRCD services went back online faster than expected. Folding at Home (F@H) is being put off until we receive more RAM for the server.

Enjoy the fall weather as afternoon temperatures start to enter their “perfect” levels (but for such a short period of time), and be sure to check out the sunrises which develop the most marvelous hues as Winter approaches.

Last Wednesday, the site went offline after a system update. Either MySQL, PHP, or Apache had been changed, and the issue which occurred I was unable to resolve.

Thanks to good timing, I had only gotten the new server a week earlier. And now, we are completely moved over to it. After some literal sparks (improperly grounded ATX cable plus an unsuspecting CD-R/W drive equaled smoke. Drive now dead) and fighting getting the GRUB bootloader to work correctly, we are now back online.

The amount of RAM has actually been reduced to 256MB. This is, simply, because I do not have any other DDR RAM on hand. I plan to have this resolved in the next few weeks. Until then, the resources made up in gained processing power should make up for this.

What has changed:
Two network cards (ooohhh…)
AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+, 1 cores (aaahhh)
And lots of fans.

I’ll soon be upgrading to a newer server (still physically controlled by myself), a big jump from the current server (but still far from the bleeding edge of technology). My summer break from writing is ending, and I’ll soon be back at writing new technology news in the future weeks to come, but I will also begin focusing more on the music side of the site.

The new server will be a major improvement in terms of  NIC speed and processor speed — not so much in memory (since the current server is not low on memory, there is no need for an upgrade here), and many more fans. The old server will be kept as a backup, probably syncronizing on a regular basis, shutting down, and waiting for a WoL ping and a person to tell it to take over.

IRCD users, the change of servers for you should be fairly transparent. Notice will be given before the switchover.

These changes should occur in the next two weeks. The site should be accessible read-only during that time. I’d like to thank the folks at Cloudflare for making offline access possible during past times of failure (whether power, ISP, or NIC response failure) including what will happen in the near future.