Advance Notice of Downtime - Moving Servers!

[LastChanceHotel]

Hello all.

Tonight ( 3rd of May 2007 ) pausegaming.com will be moving to a *New Server*. This will involve a short period when the site will be unavailable to certain people - this is expected to be shorter than 6 hours, and only 10-20% of visitors will be affected (mainly people on 'budget' ISPs like Plusnet, TalkTalk etc that cache their DNS queries very heavily). Most visitors will be able to see the new site the instant that it has been moved.

The scheduled outage is going to be from 11pm until 5am, running into friday morning. The forum will be shut down, everything will be moved to the new server, and the forum restarted after essential checks have been carried out.

The changeover is expected to be smooth however there may well be some problems with missing libraries etc, which will be fixed as they appear.

The new server is about five times as powerful as the old one, the changeover is happening in order to negate some CPU and disk problems with the old server.

Please feel free to drop me an email on lastchancehotel@gmail.com if you notice any problems or have any questions.

Thanks,

Jan

[Sid]

Well that went smoothly - nice one.

[LastChanceHotel]

Yep, as Sid noticed, server move complete! Yay for propreitary webhosting software.

You should notice less random 5-second freezes while browsing the site, and everything should load a bit quicker.

Again, let me know if you notice anything broken or not quite as it should be. Thanks.

Jan

[Fyndir]

I would laugh if the clock on the new server went boom now. ;)

[Hex]

Yep, all works peachy. Had to reboot my router though, damn caching!

[DAve]

ARGH! I can't see the internets!

Oh, wait, it's still there. :D

[Hex]

Hate to be the bringer of bad news, but since the move to the new server the forums actually seem to take longer to load than before. Anyone else experiencing this?

[Fyndir]

Hate to be the bringer of bad news, but since the move to the new server the forums actually seem to take longer to load than before. Anyone else experiencing this?

It's because of all your fucking talk about piracy.

/voteban

[Sid]

Hate to be the bringer of bad news, but since the move to the new server the forums actually seem to take longer to load than before. Anyone else experiencing this?

I'm not entirely sure of what we were on and what we've moved to, but they've been much more responsive for me. Anyone else having any issues?

[Bluepixie]

It's uber fast for me now. Particularly using the gallery, is very swift.

[Hex]

Meh, maybe my ISPs just having an off day. I'll see if it gets better

[LastChanceHotel]

Meh, maybe my ISPs just having an off day. I'll see if it gets better

Tiscali are hardly the best ISP in the world at the best of times.

[LastChanceHotel]

Uh oh.

My backup job last night failed to complete due to the partial failure of the backup drive on the server - which means I'm going to need to do a full backup of the drive, and get a techie to replace the drive.

I will provide an update when I know more about when the replacement date will be, but I expect it'll be after hours tomorrow as I will be doing the backup tonight.

This does not affect the performance of the server otherwise, so the site and gameserver should be pretty much unaffected aside from the outage (and performance tonight at midnight until about 3am).

Jan

[Hex]

Tiscali are hardly the best ISP in the world at the best of times.

Don't knock it, it's cheap!

[Phizz]

I was having a few probs with my Tiscali too. Seems to have cleared up now. Just keep hammering on a customer support. They spout some crap sometimes. Told them I'd checked my router and with a separate modem and they still told me problem was at my end. Even rang BT to check if there was a fault on the line. No joy. Told me to do the speed test which was coming back as way below speed and varying wildly. I think someone quietly fixed it eventually.

[Hex]

Yeah I've had the same experience, the tech support people don't know shit - I rang them to complain of high latency on the line and they told me to run speed test. I explained to them that the speed was fine but the latency was a joke. They assured me it would be sorted out. I had that conversation 3 times before the problem was actually sorted, total muppets. Still, bulldog were worse....

[LastChanceHotel]

More downtime tonight - trying to get an autothumbnailer for another gallery I host to work, so need to recompile apache. Such fun!

In addition there will be a second period of downtime tonight, where I will be optimising the webserver setup a bit so it consumes less memory. Currently it's running out of RAM a little bit.

Should all be done by 3am!

Jan

[Hex]

Well as many of you probably noticed the forum was down again this evening. This is an observation rather than a complaint but the forum/website actually seems less reliable since the server move! I understand from speaking to Sideshow that the server was taken down to add some RAM (presumably in order to rectify the problems) so lets hope it's worked :-)

[LastChanceHotel]

Yeah, the server was down to get some more RAM thrown in and a replacement disk... Yet, it seems my ISP failed to do either of these things, only to bring the server to its knees and unable to boot for 3 hours. They couldn't get the other drive to work, and they bought the wrong RAM. the fools!

Sorry everyone, kneecaps have been broken and when they return to replace the disk properly this time and install the extra RAM the downtime will be measured in minutes, not days.

Yeah, the new server's been a bit of a pain, mainly due to running of of RAM a lot. This should hopefully change with the addition of some more memory!

I'm going to try and pine for some money back for this month, as they've managed to screw quite a lot up.

Jan

[Sid]

The PauseGaming CS server is down for now - it was using too much RAM and messing the web server up as you may have noticed.

[DAve]

Thread resurection.

I was going to post about how the servers fell over, but they're back up again. Oh well. Thanks, Jan ;)

[LastChanceHotel]

Holy jesus it's been a long, annoying, websiteless weekend.

first of all I'd like to apologise to everyone who has been without forums for nearly 4 days - if I'd have known updating Cpanel to the latest 'safe' version would have been such an excruciatingly painful process, I wouldn't have even bothered!

Secondly, I'd like to reassure people that now I have had to completely reformat the entire goddamn server and build it up again, from scratch, that stupid downtime should be a thing of the past. Unfortunately I'm going to need to perform some magic on the game server, which is also going to need a reinstall. Sigh...

Anyway, feel free to post abuse (not like that'd stop you normally ;)), death threats, reasons why you felt cheated etc - I'm beyond caring now, it's been 17 hours since I started trying to fix this thing today and I'm pretty much immune.

If anyone spots anything broken/not working on the site, please let me know so I can fix it.

Goodnight all!

Jan

[Fyndir]

If anyone spots anything broken/not working on the site, please let me know so I can fix it.

The entire site.

All weekend.

LEIK OHMAIGAWD YEW FAILUREZ!!111AESFFAF

HOW KAN DIS HAPPENZ??!?!?

I R PAYING NO MONEYZ FOR DIS SERVIZ!!!! I DISURV PERFECTIONZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I HOAP YEW GIT CANSERZ ND AIDZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Sideshow]

Glad it's back up.

[Phizz]

tbh Jan as long as you got it fixed it's all good. I've been working with the NICEIC ( Electrical Contractor's Website) for checking ads and it's been down for a month so do you worry. No abuse coming from me.

[Chesire Cat]

OMG WTF! i had no source of amusement all weekend JAN! >=(
ches are not happy.

[Hex]

rofl at Fyndir. Thanks for all the hard work Jan :-)

[phycho]

jeesh jan, given that you use xen for your business couldnt you at least have tested on a virtual dedicated server or something first?

ditto to the cpanel thing though, i (generally) hate web based control panel software anyway.

[LastChanceHotel]

jeesh jan, given that you use xen for your business couldnt you at least have tested on a virtual dedicated server or something first?

[technical discussion ahead]
I did: however, I discovered that I needed to upgrade Xen in order to support the out-of-the-box kernel that Cpanel wanted (some netfilter modules), so this basically meant I had to reinstall the whole host machine as well (CentOS 4 with homegrown kernels to FC6 with out of the box kernels) in order to get Xen 3.1 to work properly.

Thing is, web based control panel software makes my life bearable :P It's hard enough to do user control on who can upload and run what: let alone getting Apache to play ball with mod_rewrite, mod_bandwidth etc etc!

[LastChanceHotel]

Guess what, another hour or so of downtime scheduled for this evening: I need to migrate the webserver machine from the old, tired Pentium 4 server with fucked up hard disks to a newer,shinier Xeon machine with 2 gigs of RAM and a 250GB disk.

This shouldn't take more than an hour.

Jan

edit: well, that took significantly longer than an hour (more like 5). Serves me right for trying to copy a 20GB file into a partition only 19.9999999GB in size (due to it formatting down smaller)!

It should be exactly the same now, only faster. This new machine kicks ass!

[Muppet]

Any chance of the .138 box coming back with more resources (i.e ram)? :p

[LastChanceHotel]

Any chance of the .138 box coming back with more resources (i.e ram)? :p

oh yes. :P

I'll set it copying across now.

Jan

[Muppet]

Great, thanks.