ANNOUMNCEMENT - SERVER UPGRADE

[Snowman]

As most of you know the Perisher has faced a number of hardware and software related issues recently, 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 3.2 GHz server with 2Gb ECC ram and dual SCSI drives.

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. Unfortunately this means we need to RE IP everyone with a new IP address. Resellers will be assigned new IP's for their accounts as well.

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 in an overnight timeslot, yet to be determined, 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 currently being partitioned and software will be installed shortly. We have an external security auditor who will be working over the new servers and configuring them so they are highly optimised and made extremely secure.

We will then spedn the night load testing the hardware and all things going well we are planning for a migration to the new hardware either Tomorrow or Wednesday night, but i will know more on this once i have everything setup in a few hours.

I will update everyone later this evening.

[Snowman]

The new hardware is ready for use and we will be starting the server migration of sites tonight at 9pm AEST

If you are running a forum type site i would strongly suggest you ut your sites into maintenance mode until tomorrow morning so as to not cause any loss of posts while the migration takes place.

New IP's will be assigned to everyones sites and this information will be updated in the helpdesk at that time. You can view your welcome email at any time from within the helpdesk.

Resellers and those on dedicated IP's will also have new IP's and we will be -re-routing the old servers dns thru to the new server once the move is complete so there should be no need to update any IP's unless you are using remote dns services.

If you are or if you have any queries regarding this server move please open a support ticket at the helpdesk.

[Snowman]

The server migration has commenced.

The process will take several hours at which time all clients sites will be switched over to the new server.

I will post the new IP details once the move is completed and the IP's are assigned.

[Snowman]

First stage of the migration is complete.

All general hosting clients are now being hosted from the new server.

Reseller clients sites are currently being migrated and once complete will have new IP's assigned.

Sites with dedicated IP's will be assigned new IP's one the server move is complete

I will update everone once the move is at the next step

[Snowman]

Just a quick update...

currently we are about 50% of the way thru the migrationof reseller clients and we should have everything complete in about 3 hours time.

I will update eveyone again in a couple of hours.

[Snowman]

The migration is almost complete.

All resellers master sites are online under their NEW IP addresses and any remaining clients sites will be re assigned to their new IP's in a few minutes.

Apologies for the delay but network traffic slowed the process down.

Once the migration is complete i will post further details and important information

Regards

Steve

[Snowman]

The server move is complete.

Im just doing some final tweaking and ajustments to accounts and configurations on the server.

The new shared Perisher IP is 70.86.139.2

All customers on Montrose should login to webmail on the old Perisher server to check that no email was mis-routed to it during the move.

You can login at http://69.56.214.2:2095 using your cpanel username and password.

Please ensure you check all account folders and clear out any new email from them.

I also strongly urge all customers to check thru their sites to ensure all data has been copied and that their sites are correctly working.

The old server will stay online until Monday 19th September so as to allow access. After Monday the server will be turned off and all data on it destroyed.

If you have any queries about the move or any problems please open a support ticket at the helpdesk and we will be glad to help.

Regards

Steve

[Snowman]

Please note the old server will be deactivated this Sunday 25th September.

If you require backups of old data please obtain them before then.

[Snowman]

Just a final reminder to everyone to check that their sites are all workign correctly, and that their dns and nameservers are set right as once the old server is turned off data will no longer be recoverable from it.