ZylBlog

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.

The Monthly Update. Information that is only useful to some, but an easy post to make for me. (It’s true, at least I didn’t lie.)

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Goings On at Server Headquarters:
On July 2nd and 3rd, we had a few bumps in server availability. Apache became unresponsive, even after a restart. Memory resources were becoming depleted, and was spilling over to the pagefile. Lots of starting and stopping Apache got it working again. I also pruned the enabled mods in Apache to increase security and reduce load.

July 11th, Google Ads just wasn’t pulling through what we expected, and we are now starting to remove Adsense from the site.

July 13, server was upgraded to an incredible, whopping, massive 4194304 kilobits (Okay, sounded bigger that way, right?) or 512MB. This should eliminate MySQL memory flooding and any Apache issues.

July 17, the WordPress installation was moved to the root directory. Type 304 redirects were set in place as well as redirects to deal with the old permalinks.

July 20, cleanup on a few of the old posts made prior to the decision to be dedicated to technology.

July 28, A freak storm hit Waterville, where the server is stashed away in a basement. Total downtime occurred for about one hour. I manually unplugged the server because the power was cycling, flickering, dimming, etc. The server kicks back on when power comes back on, but it was not work the risk taking to have it constantly going up and down. It was a good lightning show!

July 31, a second storm hit, causing a a ~5 minute power outage. Nothing damaged, everything came back up without flaw.

So, the jist of it? (since you read down all the way to the bottom, skipping nothing I am sure).. only one significant outage (more than 10 minutes) this month. Lots of planned improvements. Also, further progress on replacing the server has been made so we can handle more; I refuse to make promises at this time.