IMPORTANT - Upcoming Hardware Upgrade/Replacement

[Snowman]

As some of you may be the Falls Creek server has been struggling a bit with high loads from time to time due to high levels of spam hitting the server.

In order to deal with these high loads we have decided to replace the Airlie server hardware with a higher spec server which will offer double the processing power and extra redundancy.

We are currently preparing the new server, which is a Dual Xeon server and we are currently planning for the transfer which we are proposing to do next week. (date to be specified shortly)

For those of you who are technically minded the details of the new server are:

- Dual Intel Xeon 3.0Ghz (hyperthreaded)
- 2Gb ECC DDR Ram (expandable to 32Gb)
- Dual 80Gb SATA Drives in Raid 1 Array
- 160Gb SATA Drive for cPanel backups

The new server is hyperthreaded which allows the cpu s to run as though there are 4 cpus instead of 2 physical ones, this gives twice the Processing power

The main drives are running in Raid 1 array which means if in the unlikely event that one of the drives suffers a hardware failure the server will continue to run while fauklty drive is replaced. This will also speed up the servers delivery of webpages slightly as well.

We will be also upgrading the operating sysytem to Centos 4.3 which is the latest community enterprise release of Linux.

MySQL will be upgraded to version 5 and PHP will also be upgraded to php 5.1.4

There will be a small amount of downtime while we switch the hardware over but the plan is to copy all the sites across to the new hardware and then switch the dns across. This will mean there is no need to re-assign anyone with new IP's or nameservers, which in turn results in less downtime and hopefully no issues.

The old server will be kept online for a week after the transfer has been done so that the old data will still be available.

I ask that everyone ensure that their sites scripts are uptodate and that you have the latest security patches applied, especially for PHP scripts such as Gallery, osCommerce, Mambo and Joomla.

If anyone has any general queries about the upgrades please post them in this forum or any site specific or private issues, please lodge a ticket at the helpdesk and we will be glad to help.

Regards
Steve

[Snowman]

IMPORTANT UPDATE

The Falls Creek server will be undergoing this upgrade on Thursday 10th August commencing at 7pm AEST

There will be some interruptions to services as the transfer progresses and i will update everyone on this as we progress.

The transfer is planned to proceed like this:

1) Make a fresh backup of all sites on the server
2) Transfer those backups to the new server
3) Restore all backups
4) Re-assign the IP's to the accounts on the new server
5) Re-Install all SSL certificates
6) Switch the routing for the IP's from the old hardware to the new hardware

At this point there will be a brief interruption to services while the IP routing is switched over but we dont envisage this to be very long

From the time point where the backups are copied across to the new server thru to when we switch the IP's across all emails etc will be delivered to the old server and will not show up on the new server.

Clients will need to login via webmail to the old server via webmail thru a URL we will provide once the switch has taken place, to allow for all emails from this period to be cleared.

I will provide further details on this once we get to this stage.

Clients and resellers will not need to make any changes to their sites, dns or domains during this upgrade however we do encourage those of you with eCommerce stores or busy forums etc to put their sites into maintenance mode dueing this time

If anyone has any queries please let us know.

[Snowman]

Just a quick reminder that the server migration will be commencing at 7pm tonight

There will be no noticeable differences or outages on the server or downtime until we are ready to make the switch to the new hardware early tomorrow morning

I will update eveyriong via the forums as we progress thru this move

Regards
Steve

[Snowman]

Just a quick update

We are about 1/3 of the way thru the transfer at this stage and it is progressing nicely

I will update eveyone again in a couple of hours

[Snowman]

Amost finished the transfers, just a couple of more sites to go

We will be commencing the IP switch in about 30 minutes time.

It will take us about an hour to get all the IP's swiched over

During this time there may be weird routing going on and when we reboot the server and clear the router their will be a server wide outage while the transfer is completed.

PLEASE NOTE at that time the Support Desk and our main sites will be offline as they are on this server.

For any urgent support requests during this time please send either Angus or Myself a PM and we will be happy to help

[Snowman]

IP's are beeing re-applied currently and the server should be back online in about 10 to 15 mins

[Snowman]

Server move is completed and eveyrone is now operating on the new hardware

If you have any troubles with your site since the move please open a support ticket at the helpdesk

[Snowman]

You will be able to access your old cpanel's via

http://202.60.72.252:2082

with your cpanel username and password

The last 24 hours mail if it hasnt been downloaded via POP will be available by logging into Webmail at

http://202.60.72.252:2095

using either the cpanel username and pass for the default email address or the email address and corresponding password for POP accounts

Resellers should they need to can access the old WHM via:

http://202.60.72.252:2086