[admin (no pm's please)]

It has cost a whopping £8,625.00, so if anyone still feels like donating  

The new server will be placed in the UK, creating an opportunity for us to geolocate forums according to main audience.

[MarkB]

Great news!

Please put me on a UK server

[admin (no pm's please)]

Bit early for requests  

It will be a week or two before delivery and then it will need putting in the datacenter.

It is also very important that we get the configuration polished, it will have a lot of different things happening at the server end, and these things are always 100x more difficult to change than to get right in the first place.

[Bravo]

Great news.

Beans and chips for tea for a while, eh?  

[admin (no pm's please)]

It was indeed a painful sum of money, but our last server buying round was three years ago, and times move on.

Spending the money demonstrates our commitment to the service, it would be easy to say that the forums are running perfectly fast (as indeed they are) and we don't need to commit further, but I'd rather we took the opportunity to revamp using the new server to free up completely the older servers for a complete re-install.
It will leave us set for possibilities we cannon entertain right now.

[while()]

spec? Does that include colo costs?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Colocation is on top.

2 x  Intel Xeon X5550 Processor (2.66GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT), 1333MHz
48gb RAM
6 hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration

are the highlights. The X5550 processors are pretty special It would be a fair approximation to say the new server has close to the welly of all three main forum servers put together.

[while()]

[admin (no pm's please)]

The price does include 5years of Dell 4 hour call out. Expensive but I think it is short changing people to gamble against it. We have similar on all three other servers and have not used it once   but all the same...

[Zudane]

I think that no matter how good a site is, it's worthless if the site isn't reliable.

Who cares if you have an awesome site that you can only actually get to once in a while?

Going for the reliability and the support for it is a great choice  

Somewhat makes me want to move back to your servers :P

[while()]

[admin (no pm's please)]

The network has been good where we are and was selected partially on those grounds.

The new UK datacenter boasts very good connectivity as well. Time will I guess tell.

Things are only ever as good as the weakest link, but in our case I think we can rest assured that it won't be the raw server power that lets us down.

I guess all told we will have spent £30,000 ($50,000) on hardware in less than 4 years, all whilst not smothering the forums with adverts or otherwise trying to pester people for money via spam emails or some of the other tricks companies get up to.

What you won't see in the next month is us telling people donate money and you can get on the new and fastest server!

[Zudane]

[I'm_Hackin'_Bored!]

[admin (no pm's please)]

To keep people in touch with what's going on here's a quick report.

The new server is still more than a week away from delivery. But there is quite a bit going on.

First off a 48gb server is actually a bit of a lemon by default   Some things at a server level don't really scale that well, in fact even our current main servers with 16gb on board are not being utilized as well as they might be

This is where "virtualisation" comes in, we will be using XenServer to turn one big server into perhaps 6 or more smaller ones, each working at a more sensible scale. A working "forums server image" has already been created and is being honed further.

Next off we need to put forums on the new server. We already move forums around servers to balance load, but till now phpbb3 moving has not been tried on live forums and people with forums on their own domains have never been moved. So those procedures are being worked on. We will also need to shift the domain name server somewhere. We need to be able to shift any type of forum or domain as the aim is to rapidly clear down the Zaphod server and ship it to the UK.

We should then be able to work the same virtualisation magic on Zaphod and house it along side the new server. That will give us two big UK servers and two big US (just got a phone call and I won the lottery) servers, the future of the US ones will be up for debate and will depend a lot on network speeds, in the UK accessing the US servers has been fine, and if that is true in reverse then we may end up all in the UK, but I am hoping that if we have a clear option then we should be able to negotiate our US costs downwards.

ps) The lottery win was £10  

[admin (no pm's please)]

This Saturday I will probably put in place changes on the existing forum servers.

That will put in place all the new code written to put the finishing touches on forum moves, and also to more neatly support additional forum servers.

We may as well give that code a bit of a "work out" before going live.

The forum moves are geared now to take across not just your current forum type but also any phpbb3 upgrade that is in progress (though not if you are actually midway though a database conversion which would be very unlucky, but would "failsafe") and also any legacy phpbb2 forum just in case.

Own domains should also succeed, simply redirecting the domain to the moved forum link until the domain name servers updated and propagated. That may be something the owner needs to do unless they bought the domain from us.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Dell reckon the server is now in "pre-delivery"

[admin (no pm's please)]

We now have a slightly earlier date for the server and I'm sorting out more of the nut and bolts issues with the datacenter. Quite scary in some ways, but exciting in others I will be disappointed if by a week Saturday we have not got some forums running on it.

[admin (no pm's please)]

The forum code changes are in place.

The "management" changes will go in tomorrow.

I think next Saturday might be optimistic for a start date for transfers, as we do have to wait a good 48 hours after IPs are allocated for the base new forum addresses to fully propagate, so that really means the server being installed Wednesday, and I doubt that will happen.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Following on from someone commenting on how bad other services are, it has just occurred to me that since myff started our average spend simply on buying servers has been rather more than $1000 per month, yet we have seen one joker think he could run a competing service by spending $10 a month on shared hosting  

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have the beast running forums and being remotely manageable via KvmOIP

Usefully it seems the KvmOIP card can share the system network card, which saves a few quid a month. Although I suppose that might be a false economy.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I think it most likely we will deliver the server Thursday, and it will be installed Friday. There is just no sense in rushing things, there is nothing like having the thing actually here to focus the mind on the details, as such I am making a few changes to the configuration, and there are still things I want to test more.

[admin (no pm's please)]

We seem good to go

Two servers running virtual machines have networked together on their own LAN. A trivial issue (at least if you have the XenServer set to use the right interface   ) but one of vital importance.

Forums are also transferring with seeming success to the live server.

[admin (no pm's please)]

The server is now awaiting installation at the Datecentre.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Had a little nerve racking hour there, as they told me the server was up, but it was not visible to me  

But it is there now, and we have ips, so the work really starts now.

[while()]

[admin (no pm's please)]

We're now in the same boat on the "real" ip addresses  

[admin (no pm's please)]

still some propagation issues, but the forum environment is now seeing the raw forum client bits and bobs.

I'm still working in a "raw" console for no sensible reason at all, and it gets contaminated by constant security alerts as even on a totally new and unlinked server random ip scanning hackers try their luck  

[admin (no pm's please)]

Now trying to get a Plesk based system up and running, needed so that we can totally clear down the Zaphod server.

It is good to do a lot of the bits in parallel, more chance to see any potential server issues that way.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Plesk is now up. I had little choice but to build a new installation from scratch.

What is very frustrating there is that it throws that install back to php5.16 which is crazy when things like the latest phpMyAdmin demand  5.2  

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have a forum moving to and thro from zaphod to the new server

It has its own domain name, but tracking the DNS updates the move manages to update the DNS to where the forum was rather than where it is going  

[admin (no pm's please)]

Firewall has been tweaked some more, it is still a bit vicious

[Lavathing9]

Since my forum is has its primary base in the US, will this change to the new server effect gaining more US members, etc.?

[admin (no pm's please)]

Having the servers in the US has not adversely effected UK forums. But if speed should become an issue then we now at least will be able to geolocate forums.