www2/www3 server replacement announcement

News concerning Priority Colo, this includes network status updates, upgrades to services, new services, and general stuff you might be interested in knowing.

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porcupine
Site Admin
Posts: 703
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2002 5:57 pm
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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www2/www3 server replacement announcement

Post by porcupine »

Hi guys,

We have decided that the time has come to replace our older reseller servers with more current, and fault tolerant servers. As such, we will be replacing the www2, and www3 servers during February with the following hardware configurations:

Dual Xeon 2.8GHZ, 2MB Cache/CPU, 64 bit compatible
2GB DDR333 ECC/Reg. Memory
2 x 160GB Seagate SATA 7200 RPM/8MB Cache
3ware based hardware RAID 1
Hot Swap 1u Supermicro chassis W/passive cooling
CentOS 4.2 (32 bit)

While the CPU speed increases will be relatively small (800mhz for www2, 400mhz for www3), the newer drives, RAID1, additional memory capacity (up to 16GB per system), and clean CentOS install (notably, hopefully repairing any still lingering CPanel stat issues) should make this a worthwhile investment for all involved. Notably if whatsoever possible, we will attempt to integrate the IP migration into this move (testing must still be done, but if we can kill two birds with one stone, while retaining backward compatability with the current IP configuration, it will be done).

The current servers will have all of their content, configuration files, etc. rsync'd to the new servers, to be swapped live. Based on the migration performed in similar fashion for the www3 - www6 servers in December of 2004, we can expect to see 2-3 outages, ranging from 30 seconds, to 15 minutes from this upgrade.

More details regarding this upgrade will be released when the hardware has been procured (presently in transit), and throughly tested. A email specifically addressing this upgrade will be sent several days prior to the maintenance window, ensuring that all customers are "in the loop".

Regards,
Myles Loosley-Millman
Priority Colo Inc.
myles@prioritycolo.com
http://www.prioritycolo.com
porcupine
Site Admin
Posts: 703
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2002 5:57 pm
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Contact:

Post by porcupine »

The new www2/www3 servers have arrived, been assembled, and now have the preliminary content migration completed.

Both the www2 and www3 servers will be migrated to the new hardware on Thursday March 2nd, 2006, between 2:00am, and 8:00am. We expect each server to be unavailable for 2 to 5 windows of 3-15 minutes while this migration is completed, servers are rebooted, and typical issues are quickly ironed out immediately following the migration. All customers on the servers in question will receive email notification of this to the addresses we have on file.

While customers should not loose any email in this transaction, customers may experience duplicate emails (both inbound and outbound) over the next 36 hours as duplicate mail queues will exist due to the content migration, and some undelivered messages may duplicate and deliver by both the old, and new servers.

Regards,
Myles Loosley-Millman
Priority Colo Inc.
myles@prioritycolo.com
http://www.prioritycolo.com
porcupine
Site Admin
Posts: 703
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2002 5:57 pm
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Contact:

Post by porcupine »

Well, both the www2 and www3 servers have been successfully replaced. This operation went as close to flawless as we could have possibly hoped. www2 had its smtp, pop3, and ftp down for about 20 minutes, but its mysql and http down for two periods of less then 5 minutes (second time was just a simple reboot to swap the main IP).

www3's move went much the same, except www3 had a total http downtime of < 3 minutes, as it only required a single reboot, and everything came back up on the new system without any errors whatsoever.

Certain FTP Accounts may need to connect to the servers hostnames, instead of ftp.domain.com as the main IP's of the servers have changed (and the "ftp.domain.com" aliases haven't been reset yet, as theres a LOT of them to do, and we must find a method to streamline this).

This maintenance window is now closed. I hope everyone enjoys the new servers. If anyone is experiencing problems with the new servers in any way, please dont hesitate to email me. If its impacting a critical service, please use the pager.

Regards,
Myles Loosley-Millman
Priority Colo Inc.
myles@prioritycolo.com
http://www.prioritycolo.com
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