ANNOUMNCEMENT - SERVER UPGRADE

[Snowman]

As most of you know the FallsCreek has faced a number of hardware and software related issues since the server was setup, with a lot of load issues causing outages in the past month.

We have been performing an extremely intensive audit on the software and hardware of the server, and of all clients sites.

We identified a number of problems, both software and hardware related and several issues caused by accounts which are far to busy for a shared server environment and several with very poorly written code causing load issues.

As some of you may know we arranged to upgrade the server hardware to address these issues and had hoped this would have already taken place.

Unfortunately a delay in delivery of the new hardware has delayed this until this week.

I am now pleased to announce that the server will be upgraded to a Brand New DELL Power Edge Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz server with 2Gb ECC ram and dual SATA drives which will be running in a RAID 1 format.

While most of this techno mumbo jumbo possibly means nothing to a lot of you in basic terms it means the servers CPU capacity will be more than doubled and with brand new hardware the new server will far outperform the current platform.

This changeover while being a complex process will essentially involve copying all clients sites across to the new hardware from the daily backup, with the accounts recreated. Once this is done the servers IP's will be switched across from the old server to the new server, meaning that there should be no need to re-IP clients sites and resellers name servers, as has been the case in past server moves and upgrades.

The old server left online on a temporary IP for a short time as a precautionary backup.

The upgrade will unfortunately involve downtime; however we plan to keep this to an absolute minimum.

We plan to do the upgrade overnight so as to cause the least amount of interruption to most clients’ sites.

I will be updating this ticket with specific planned times and further details as we progress thru the process so as to keep everyone in the loop.

I urge anyone that is not currently subscribed to the server announcement forum to do so as to be kept up-to-date.

I thank everyone for their patience in this trying time and look forward to being involved in a far superior, stable service in the future

If you have any concern or questions please feel free to ask.

Regards

Steve

[Snowman]

The server is ready for the migration process to commence. We will be starting the migration of sites at 9pm AEST on Saturday 24th September

We envisage process will take less than 12 hours to complete.

The sites will all be copied across to the new server and then once the move is completed the accounts on the new server will have the IP's transferred from the old server to the new one and re-assigned back onto the accounts.

This should occur early on Sunday morning.

There will be some data that will be on the old server, such as email etc which will need to be cleared but i will post details on how to do this once the move is complete.

I would also suggest anyone with a busy forum site or site using mysql such as ecommerce shops etc that you switch your sites off temporarily for maintenance during this time frame so as to not cause any loss of data etc.

If anyone has any questions please let us know.

[Snowman]

The server is ready for the migration process to commence. We will be starting the migration of sites at 9pm AEST tonight.

We envisage process will take around 12 hours to complete.

The sites will all be copied across to the new server and then once the move is completed the accounts on the new server will have the IP's transferred from the old server to the new one and re-assigned back onto the accounts.

This should occur tomorrow morning.

There will be some data that will be on the old server, such as email etc which will need to be cleared but i will post details on how to do this once the move is complete.

I would also suggest anyone with a busy forum site or site using mysql such as ecommerce shops etc that you switch your sites off temporarily for maintenance during this time frame so as to not cause any loss of data etc.

If anyone has any questions please let us know.

[Snowman]

The server move is now underway and should be completed overnight early morning. Once completed i will give further details on the process of the changeover.

[Snowman]

Just a quick update on progresss.

We are about 50% of the way thru the transfer process. (things are going a bit slower than we had hoped due to high traffic on a few sites on FallsCreek)

I will update everyone again once the transfers are nearing completion

[Snowman]

All sites have now been copied to the new hardware and we will be shortly taking the server offline to swap the IP's across to the new server.

Sites will be offline for a short period while we do the switch.

Apologies on the time of day this is being done but server traffic issues and a network issue slowed down the transfers.

I will update everyone with further info once the IP's have been switched to the new hardware and the server is brought online.

[Snowman]

The servers have been swapped over and we are just waiting for routing to be switched to the new server.

You can access CPanel on the old server at http://202.60.64.243:2082 and webmail at http://202.60.64.243:2095 for a period of 1 week if you need to migrate any data across from the old server

Please check your email accounts including the catchall so as to make sure that any mail delivered since 9pm last night has not mistakenly been routed to the old server.

If you have any problems please open a support ticket at the helpdesk

[Snowman]

Everythign should now be back to normal.

I apologies for the delay in getting things back online the IP block was not binding correctly to the router and needed some "forceful encourangement"

Can everyone please check their sites and ensure everythign is running correctly.

If you have any problems please let me know as soon as possible by dropping in a ticket to the helpdesk.

Regards

Steve