22-Apr-2005 - www6.pcdc.net upgrade - Dual Xeon

[porcupine]

Hi guys,

Well after the sucess of moving www4.pcdc.net to its new Dual Xeon rig with minimal incidents, and a few days of testing various components, we're now feeling confident on the platform, and will be proceeding to move www6 off its seriously broken AMD64/CPanel64 platform to its own Dual Xeon 2.8GHZ.

The new www6 server is near identical to the new www4 server, except it houses 2GB of DDR ECC400 Registered memory (instead of the 1GB in www4).

I have thus set the tentative move date for Friday April 22nd, 2005, between 12:00am (midnight) and 6:00am EST. As with the www4 server, we will be turning off non-critical services first for file synchronization, in the order of: ftp, pop3, smtp, cpanel services, mysql, and finally httpd. Customers should expect 1-2 outages of between 3, and 15 minutes during this move, though a worst case scenario could see one or two slightly longer outages (if we run into a major hitch).

While we have repaired the exim problem that we encountered in the www4 move before it could happen, we do expect that the www6 server move will be slightly more complicated (and thus prone to problems), as we are moving platform types, from the previous 64 bit platform, back to the currently standard 32 bit platform. We ask that customers bear with us during this move, as this should repair many of the broken features.

If all goes well, by the weekend, everything will be well and sorted on the new www6 server, and the old AMD 64 problems will be nothing but a memory of the past (though likely a headache for some future upgrade, though not anytime soon!).

Regards,

[porcupine]

I'm starting the first phases of the migration now.

Lets cross our fingers on this one

[porcupine]

Well,

It looks (thus far, fingers crossed) like that move was a complete and total sucess.

The move completed so quickly, that nagios (which is checking various services, every 3 minutes) didn't even manage to catch http down (though it caught pop3/smtp, etc. down as they were turned down for about 15 minutes).

Everything is up on the new server, and running near flawlessly from what I can see. If anyone experiences any problems with the new server, please dont hesitate to say something .