Most notably SRV records have been added , and in this process I introduced performance timing of the servers in the pool. This is now reflected both in the SRV pool and in the primary pool of A records. Hopefully this makes the pool even more responsive and improve the user-experience.

In addition usage statistics of the pool has been added by analyzing the bind query log across the various DNS NameServers involved.

But now that summer is here I’ve managed to find some time for some fun, too. And this, obviously (for people that knows me it should be fairly obvious anyways), includes time spent working with computers and programming of such. The thing is, my server farm didn’t cut it anymore, as Gamma was pushing the limits of it capacity. Beta is old enough as it is and Alpha is all the way in Ã…lesund doing its job nicely so I try not to overwork it too much.

This prompted the addition of a new server in the server farm, but first, lets recap the existing farm:

Gamma
For those who don’t know already, Gamma is the primary server in my apartment in Oslo, it is Dell PowerEdge 1900 with a Xeon 5110 1.6GHz/4MB CPU and 2 GB of RAM consisting of 6x 750 GB drives in a RAID-5 setup contributing an efficient storage capacity of 3.4 TiB to the network (the rest of the overhead is ext3 overhead and system partitions).

Gamma serves DNS, as well as runs the SKS keyserver keys2.kfwebs.net as well as most other tasks on the LAN.

Beta
Beta is the oldest computer in the farm, aging back to 2001. It has a graphical setup and is used as workstation in Oslo. The CPUs are Dual PIII 1000 MHz and it has 1 GB of RAM and about 1 TiB of non-redundant storage. It is the router on the network and as such provides both a firewall, DHCP server and a squid transparent proxy.

Alpha
Alpha is the primary web and email server and is hosted on dedicated line in Ålesund. it runs the sks server keys.kfwebs.net as well as DNS. The server is a Dell PowerEdge SC1420 with a Intel® Xeon™ prosessor (3.00GHz, 2MB cache, 800MHz FSB) and 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (2×512MB 400MHz DIMMs). It has a 73GB SCSI Ultra320 (10000rpm) 1′’ 68 pin drive.

Delta
This brings us to Delta. Delta will be an addition to Beta and Gamma in Oslo and has a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor, 8 GB of RAM and 16 x 1TB drives in a RAID-6 setup with two redundant drives. This adds about 12.7 TiB of storage to the network (again looking away from system drives on the server itself)

To sum things up, running Monte Carlo simulations on this farm is rather quick.

We now offer the following domain names:
* yourname.allyourblogsbelongto.us
* yourname.bloganon.in
* yourname.bloggard.net
* yourname.blogmy.name
* yourname.doesnotgetlaid.com
* yourname.getslaid.com
* yourname.gotablog.net
* yourname.hasablog.net
* yourname.humorousblog.com
* yourname.passive12.com
* yourname.passive12.net
* yourname.yourblog.in

In addition to this the statistics have been integrated far better as an own tab under Manage->statistics. The most interesting new feature might be the Revenue Sharing program. In addition to this we offer 16 themes for bloggers.

Feel free to provide any feedback.

Of these, the first 10,000 visitors visited during the first five hours after the story hit the frontpage.

What started as a good upgrade giving a tripled upstream speed to better serve everybody soon became a misery.

For some reason I was unable to connect remotely after the router switch although it should have been pre-configured to match the appropriate TCP/IP settings.

Since I was unable to connect remotely I got a technician to connect a monitor and a keyboard as the server is about 700 kilometer away from me. The thing is, the login didn’t respond to any of the usernames or passwords. Okay, so we figured a reboot might be in order, as the possibility exist that it is simply completely frozen. And then it got to fsck of hda, the primary disk drive. And it errored miserably, without being able to continue booting.

So now I’ve moved several sites, including secure-my-email.com and secure-my-internet.com over to another server, so they are operating as they should. This is actually something I’ve considered doing for some time, so maybe a little push was good, although I would prefer it to be somewhat nicer than this one.

I also got the mail system up on a secondary server, so no emails are lost. Sadly though kfwebs.net depend on MySQL 5.0 as well as some custom-written User Defined Functions(UDF), so without a rewrite it won’t run on the other server too easily. Thankfully thanks to Myles ( myleshenderson.com ) I got access to a server that had MySQL 5.0 and hence I got up the website and it will reside there temporarily until I get my own server configured.

The websites scanners-on-linux.com and trond.in are amongst the sites that got back up throughout the past hours. mapyourfamily.name require special applications so it won’t get up before the new server is up and running.

You can download the clips yourself at: hitachigst.com

As far as gentoo goes, I found a wiki entry telling me to use the AMD64 base, as the architecture is very similar. This is also supported by a forum thread

I am doing this in preparation of getting the new server.

I will as before also use Apache2 together with PHP5 and MySQL 5.0. The webmail frontend will probably be squirrelmail configured with the OpenPGP extension (Read more about OpenPGP).

More information on the process will follow.

The server I ordered is a Dell PowerEdge SC1420. I ordered one with a Intel® Xeonâ„¢ prosessor (3.00GHz, 2MB cache, 800MHz FSB) and 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (2x512MB 400MHz DIMMs). It come with a 73GB SCSI Ultra320 (10000rpm) 1” 68 pin harddisk.

With that, may the old server rest in peace (RIP).

I have a fresh copy of all the files used on all my websites, the problem is that the system that backed up my MySQL databases is messed up and I therefore lack all the data that was in the system. I get the Hard Disk Drive mailed to me and I might be able to restore this data. If that is the case, you might see life to kfwebs.net again, if not, I’m leaving it dead.

I will keep you updated.