Dataless Solutions
"Seize the road, with me as your guide" - Daedalus
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| Server Upgrades |
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| Written by David Stumpf |
| Sunday, 22 June 2008 18:13 |
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Last night as many of you may have noticed the server was down for an extended amount of time. The short version is I have replaced the server with a newer and faster one. The long version is it's bothered me for some time that the main drive in the web server was a single drive and not a RAID setup. I've worried about the possibility of failure for some time now. I finially decided to take some action and upgrade to a RAID configuration. I pondered the idea of simple installing a new copy of the OS on a new server and moving all of the data over. The problem is I have made some major changes to the system, such as adding new software packages and made modification to a number of core system settings. Restoring from a backup could take several days before everything would be back up to 100%. While the server would be running minor changes that effect one site for example might get overlooked and may cause issues for some time. I instead decided to use the current installation and simply move the system to a new machine. To do this and get the RAID I wanted required that I aquire a real RAID card. The cheap "fake raid" cards that you see for $10 or $20 or what comes built on to standard consumer motherboards wouldn't work. I picked up a 3Ware 7006-2 hardware RAID card from Newegg for a good price. I then picked up some new (larger) drives from Micro Center (160GB PATA for $44.99 each) and went to testing the possibility of moving the system to a new server. Linux can in some ways be more of a challenge than Windows. In this case I believed the conversion was going to be very difficult. Turns out I just needed to learn how to add the drivers for the new card into the Kernel init package. Using a freeware product named G4L (originally stood for Ghost for Linux but the Norton folks gave them crap over the name so it's just G4L now I think) I managed to clone the system and move it too the new server. Avoiding any more boring technical details that 99% of the would could care less about, the bottom line is we are now running on a drive system that should protect us against failure. The CPU was upgraded from a basic 2.4Ghz P4 to a 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo. We're still running at 2GB of memory. The upgrade should speed up page load times and reduce the risk of lag. Initial benchmarks from serveral testing sites show our pages loaded faster than Google loads, so I'd say the upgrade was a success! |