The Archives

GPF, Miscellaneous
Blog Server Upgraded
June 13th, 2009 (9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

It case you missed yesterday’s tweets, the jeffdarlington.com server has been successfully upgraded both to Fedora 11 and WordPress 2.8. The GPF server is next, although I haven’t started that effort and it’s bound to take longer. I’ll make a bigger deal about the downtime for GPF when that upgrade draws closer.

Let me know if you encounter any problems with the new site.
GPF, Miscellaneous
Upcoming Server Maintenance
June 10th, 2009 (9 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Just a quick heads-up to anyone who cares, but I’m in the process of upgrading the blog server’s operating system from the creaking and decrepit Fedora 6 to the shiny new Fedora 11. I’m doing most of this work on a totally different virtual server, which I’ll then backup and overwrite this virtual server with the new image once its ready to go live. In theory, there should be only a minimum of downtime when the actual overwrite occurs. However, I’ll probably end up closing comments and such temporarily right before the flash to make sure the database stays in sync. I don’t have a time frame for when the actual flash will occur, but it should be in the next few days.

As an even more advanced warning, GPF will be getting the same upgrade (only from Fedora 8 ) once the blog server is stable. The blog comes first because (1) it’s running on the older OS and thus theoretically more vulnerable due to its venerable age and (2) it will serve as a test bed to make sure the upgrade process moves relatively smoothly. I tend to be much riskier with the blog server because it’s less important to my livelihood, so it gets to be the guinea pig for these sorts of experiments.
Internet, Miscellaneous, Technology
Down time
February 29th, 2008 (2 years ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 1 Core Dump

Not sure if anyone noticed, but both the blog and the new GPF beta test site were down last night. Our hosting service, Slicehost, informed us that a breaker blew in their data center and they were forced to bring a number of machines down to protect them. In addition, the blog server (which also hosts a number other private sites I run) stopped responding, so they had to reboot it again.

Unfortunately, while Slicehost was very informative and sent me several e-mails to keep me apprised of the situation, the sites continued to be down until early this morning. That’s when I discovered that for some bizarre reason the MySQL and Apache services were not configured to start at boot time. This is baffling, in my opinion, as I thought this was automatic with Fedora. You install the application package and, if it’s a service like this, it also installs the appropriate links in the init directories to make sure the services start on boot. Not so, apparently. I’m not sure if this is Fedora’s fault, Slicehost’s, or mine, to be honest, but it should be fixed now.

There’s one part of me thinks that this outage is an ominous sign on the eve of my leaving Keenspot. Then again, it also helped me catch a critical flaw that would have been extremely annoying if it happened a week later, after the move when thousands of readers would be hitting the new site. So I don’t know whether to be paranoid or relieved. (O_O)