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EntropiaForum Maintenance

711

711

Site Admin
Admin
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
Posts
5,346
EntropiaForum will be down for server maintenance between the hours of 15:00 and 18:00 Calypso time (11:00 am to 2:00 pm EST). Current Calypso time can be viewed at the bottom of every page of EntropiaForum.

Faster and larger drives will be installed on the server, and several software upgrades will be performed to improve speed and stability.


During the downtime, the EF Chatroom can be accessed via the URL www.EntropiaDiscussion.com while the maintenance is performed. Log in using your EntropiaForum username/password.

Also, the GamersHQ forum will be open during a portion of the maintenance period. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to visit and join the GHQ community of gamers.

Thanks for your patience during this downtime.
 
EF and EU down at same time. :(

Hopefully EU will return at 14:30.
 
NOOOOOOOOO you can't do this to me!!! What will I do instead??? Oh well guess I will have to take hubby's credit card and go shopping!! :yay:
 
I don't know what to do with my time :eyecrazy:
Wait - i do have a housework and i think i do have work work to do.. :laugh:
 
The server maintenance is now complete.

The maintenance took quite a bit longer than I had hoped, thanks for your patience. The database and files on EF equal a huge amount of data to package up and move around (over 80 GB in total).

In order to install completely new disk drives on the server, all of the data had to be packed up and moved to another location on the backend network (NAS). I also wanted to make mutliple backups, in case of error/failure, so this process took longer than I had anticipated.

The installation of the new drives and operating system was also a bit more lengthy than I wanted. Of course, all the data had to then be moved back on to the server. Even on a backend network pipe of 1000MB, this takes some time, as does unpacking it all once again.

The good news is that EF's webserver has much larger and faster drives (2 x 400 GB 15k RPM SA-SCSI in RAID 0 array), so pages will be faster than ever to load, and we have lots of room to grow along with Entropia Universe. :)

The dedicated database server that powers EF was unaffected during this maintenance, as it is already running on the fastest SCSI drives available, and is configured optimally for hosting a large forum like EF.

The server might actually seem a bit slower than before for a few hours while I am restoring other services, moving data, and reimplementing optimizations on the new operating system install. However, everything should be lightning quick once again within 24 hours.

Thanks again for your patience during the maintenance downtime.
 
Thanks 711 for your time and dedication to our community.

Extended downtime put me into EF withdrawl but I'm sure I'll live :)

Glad to be back!
 
what brand of server /s do you use here 711?
Why Scsi still? Why not move up to SATA and get better transfer speeds and cheaper costs?
sounds like a fun upgrade to perform :laugh:
I did something similar at my old work when the raid card blew on the ancient dell database server.
 
Haxtor moogle said:
what brand of server /s do you use here 711?
Why Scsi still? Why not move up to SATA and get better transfer speeds and cheaper costs?
sounds like a fun upgrade to perform :laugh:
I did something similar at my old work when the raid card blew on the ancient dell database server.
Click to expand...

SATA is not nearly as good as SCSI for webservers (or for PCs for that matter ;)).

Webservers (and especially database servers) need very fast read/write speeds and disk spindle speeds (15k rpm). SATA cannot provide comparable performance as SCSI for such implementations. SCSI is also much better suited for RAID configurations, which most dedicated webservers employ.

Performance is a much more important factor than price with critical public-facing web servers (though SCSI drives are not that much more expensive these days, if you choose a good host).

EF runs on two dedicated servers (one web, one database), each with the following specs:

Dual Processor Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5335-QuadCore-LV
8 GB DDR2 RAM
15k RPM Fast SA-SCSI Hard Drives
CentOS 5.3
 
i can understand that the maintenance of this large forum/database can take long and is an delicate operation.

Thx for all the work that you and your partners put on it.


technical information: in firefox look like EF is slower now during the page upload, maybe EF is still under maintenance???

thx
 
Dr.D.C. said:
i can understand that the maintenance of this large forum/database can take long and is an delicate operation.

Thx for all the work that you and your partners put on it.


technical information: in firefox look like EF is slower now during the page upload, maybe EF is still under maintenance???

thx
Click to expand...

Lots of data migration and tasks still running on the server (I host many more websites than just EF)

711 said:
The server might actually seem a bit slower than before for a few hours while I am restoring other services, moving data, and reimplementing optimizations on the new operating system install. However, everything should be lightning quick once again within 24 hours.

Thanks again for your patience during the maintenance downtime.
Click to expand...
 
Gallery section unavailable

Can't get into gallery to upload screenshots, just to give 711 a heads up. :)
 
Note: The forum gallery will be unavailable for an hour or two while all the files are restored.

Also, EF Adspace will be reorganized, so any active campaigns will not show for a few hours.
 
Thanks 711 ... for all your hard work to give us the most efficient forum environment possible, not to mention the continued adding of unique features.
It makes the experience quite enjoyable. :D
 
Dude, where's my Sig? ;)

I'm sure it will be fixed in due time...
 
He's aware ... he's still working on the transfer of all the content, and it will be a couple of hours yet I believe. ;)
 
Thanks for the info MS9, it's kinda hard to gratz w/o screenie lol
 
The EF gallery images have now been fully restored.
 
711 said:
2 x 400 GB 15k RPM SA-SCSI in RAID 0 array
Click to expand...
Isn't RAID 0 raising the probability to failure chance twice? I didn't know, that there are servers using RAID 0 ^^. I guess you'll have to take making a backups just in case more than others, lol.

Anyway, great work 711. Hearing of upgrades is always a thing ^^.
 
RAID 0 is "only" useful to increase performance.
A good RAID controller will write data the way that it can store and read with nearly double the speed of one drive.
It requires at least 2 drives - of which none may fail.

RAID 1 is only useful for failure security and is also called mirroring.
With a good controller you have the read increased performance though.
It requires at least 2 drives - of which 1 may fail.

RAID 5 is a compromise between security and performance.
Basically there is one failover drive so you always have x drives minus one storage (3 parts 40 gig drives equals 80 gig storage).
It requires at least 3 drives - of which 1 may fail.

But if you want performance AND security you chose RAID 10 (thats 1 and 0 combined).
Basically you have a RAID 0 with all the pros and you make another RAID 0 which is used as mirror.
You always need an equal number of drives and you have half the storage of all drives.
It requires at least 4 drives - of which 2 in the same RAID 0 may fail.

And having a RAID 10 with 8 drives rules :wtg:
 
I am using RAID 0 intentionally for performance. For pure speed, 15k SCSI drives + RAID 0 is hard to beat.

Redundancy is not an issue, as I already have several redundant backup solutions in place for the webserver files (i.e. gallery images, server scripts, etc.).

The database server (where the actual forum user data and thread/post content is stored) has 4x 15k SCSI drives in RAID 10 array.
 
Thanks for the update!
Still not able to upload pictures... After upload is finished I get this error:
"No Image specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator"
Waiting...

Cheers!
 
baxter said:
Still not able to upload pictures...
Click to expand...
Me neither... No error msg though - they're just not there; I get red x-es after pressing "Submit"...
 
Working on the gallery upload issue now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
 
Good job 711!

Is it just me that thought RAID is actually a bug spray?
 
Lol Pinky :laugh: My wake up coffee time was simply not the same without EF to browse yesterday. Thanks for all the effort 711, I was thinking of you yesterday when every time I checked the 'end time' of the job kept getting further and further away-next time feel free to just tell us it's down and it will be done when it's done ;)
 
Pirx Danford said:
RAID 5 is a compromise between security and performance.
Basically there is one failover drive so you always have x drives minus one storage (3 parts 40 gig drives equals 80 gig storage).
It requires at least 3 drives - of which 1 may fail.
Click to expand...


Pretty much every server I manage runs RAID 5. When 24/7 operation and data integrity are required, it's the most bang for the buck.

I do have a couple of RAID 0 arrays, but they are for scratch data during HD video editing and only contain transient data.

I'd love to have some RAID 10, but it always gets pulled from my budget. LOL
 
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