No Aids Racing

In an hour or two I will replace the system drive in the firewall computer that protects the network that this webserver lives on. With any luck the downtime will be less than an hour.

The current system drive is an old 3GB Quantum Fireball that has begun to show signs of dying. As an added bonus I will be upgrading the OS from FreeBSD 4.11 to FreeBSD 6.2, and also replacing ipfw with pf as the firewall software.

/Daniel

It looks good, Dan. It was down a bit earlier but seems to work perfectly now. Thanks for supporting us!

I ended up switching out the entire computer, so it was down a bit more than I first anticipated.

There might be a few reboots (~2 min each) during the evening while I sort out the mess I've made, but other than that we should hopefully be back to a nice and stable connection.

/Daniel

Awesome, thx Daniel!

As some of you know the server used in the Euro division last season is located on the same network as this webserver. This hasn't really been much of a problem because the Internet connection is pretty good. (Low latency and low hop-count to major traffic exchange, and an ISP with good peering to all major networks.)

However, with the new version of FreeBSD (the OS running on the firewall) and the added horsepower of the new hardware I have now been able to add traffic prioritization (using pf + ALTQ) to the firewall. This should make it possible to run lag-free even when the webserver is busy (for example if a bunch of people starts to download old replay files during a full grid race).

It remains to be seen if we will continue to race on my server in 2007, but IF we do the racing experience should be top-notch even if the link becomes saturated with www traffic (I'm running a few other websites off of the same webserver).

/Daniel

WOW!!!!! That is AMAZING
That's why your "DAN THE MAN"

I'm doing some work on the webserver and firewall, so there will be a few short service outages (a few minutes each) while I try stuff out.

Please let me know if anything seems strange!

For the curious:
I've installed Apache in reverse proxy mode on the firewall box (since it now has enough horsepower), allowing me to redirect each domain I serve to a different internal IP. On the real webserver I have set up a number of FreeBSD jails (a type of virtualization technology), each serving one or more domains on an aliased IP address. By doing this I will be able to use different versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL on each domain, plus I get full security isolation between domains so even if one domain gets hacked the others will be safe.

Why do I do all this work? Because I want to use PHP5 for a website I'm developing, and phpBB (this forum software) works best with PHP4. Also, the added security is something I've wanted for a long time but been unable to implement because the old firewall was too slow to do the reverse proxying.

/Daniel

yooo Dan

are u racing with us or what, i dont recall seeing something from u thats wy am asking.

cyaa

Probably not.

Real life is taking a lot of time, and I need to practice a lot to be competitive, and I hate racing when I'm not competitive...

/Daniel

DanTheMan wrote:Probably not.

Real life is taking a lot of time, and I need to practice a lot to be competitive, and I hate racing when I'm not competitive...

/Daniel

owke m8, i understand first live than Pleasure,

cyaa

I'm in the process of taking a new web & database server into service, so expect short periods of downtime.

I've already moved the database to the new server (that explains the short periods of downtime a little while ago). I'll probably move the web pages later tonight or tomorrow.

The new server is a brand new box I just bought/built:
* Dual-Core AMD Opteron 1212 (2.0 GHz)
* 4 GB DDR2 RAM
* RAID-1 array for database and web pages (plus daily offsite backups)
* FreeBSD 6-STABLE
* Functional compartmentalization using FreeBSD jails (virtual machines). One jail for every major function/website hosted on the box.

/Daniel

Wow, the commercial hosting companies must be jealous!

Seriously, even though we could never say it enough, I hope you know that your efforts are always appreciated!

I want to agree with Bilbo here, Dan, you are invaluable to us here m8, thanks again for all your effort !!!!

Wey!

FYI: I finished moving the actual webpages to the new server today. Apart from a few short service outages during the afternoon/evening I hope nobody has noticed anything strange. Things should work just the way they've always worked.

/Daniel

except few minutes downtime, all was fine, and still working great.