ILX Server Status

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Just thought I'd give you all an update of the status of the ILX server. At the moment the current server won't accept that RAM Sean Carruthers sent (the motherboard's too old) but I do have plans to upgrade it significantly in November/December (when I upgrade my workstation - the old parts will become the ILX machine).

The new box will have the following specs: (for the geeks out there)

AMD Athlon 1800XP
1gb RAM (courtesy of Sean)
2x 60gb HDD in RAID1 (full redundancy)

That should speed things up significantly. I hope we can manage with what we've got before then.

Also, now that I'm working fulltime at KeyPoint, the place at which the box is colocated, I'll be able to make backups of the database every month or so. (something we've been in dire need of for some time)

Thanks again for your donation, Sean. The ILX community will benefit greatly from it, if belatedly.

― Andrew (enneff), Saturday, 23 August 2003 01:51 (twenty-two years ago)

good to know, thank you kindly Andrew

― stevem (blueski), Saturday, 23 August 2003 02:03 (twenty-two years ago)

yay sean! yay andrew!

― Texas Sam (thatgirl), Saturday, 23 August 2003 02:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Hurrah for the AMD Athlon processor!

Andrew and Sean, thank you ever so for providing this great service. I could not thank you or the others responsible for this forum enough. *smooches* to you lot!

― Just Deanna (Dee the Lurker), Saturday, 23 August 2003 02:26 (twenty-two years ago)

What's a coupla sticks of RAM between friends? Just hope it's helpful when you have the new board!

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Saturday, 23 August 2003 03:29 (twenty-two years ago)

God Bless You Andrew!

― cinniblount (James Blount), Saturday, 23 August 2003 03:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Andrew is a Worthy Mang. :-) Sean is a Worthy Mang too, but needs to cut down on the Tim Hortons.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 23 August 2003 03:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Must resist urge to make barely parseable joke about rejecting Sean's RAM....

― Kim (Kim), Saturday, 23 August 2003 04:27 (twenty-two years ago)

when Ally & I make our platinum dancepop record all the proceeds will immediately go to purchasing ILX a dedicated rack of powerful and redundant servers with RAID arrays of insane proportions. Just so you have a hardcopy, print this out.

Until then: thanks to Andrew & Sean for making all of this possible. Angels, both of you.

― Millar (Millar), Saturday, 23 August 2003 05:32 (twenty-two years ago)

If I wasn't a member of this cult that forbids the giving of gifts, it'd be new toothbrushes all around.

― oops (Oops), Saturday, 23 August 2003 05:45 (twenty-two years ago)

i call potlatch

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 23 August 2003 07:31 (twenty-two years ago)

also, as ever, multiple thanks to all those who labour to keep ilx alive in the technical dimension

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 23 August 2003 07:36 (twenty-two years ago)

also: blessed are the cheesemakers

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 23 August 2003 07:36 (twenty-two years ago)

when Ally & I make our platinum dancepop record all the proceeds will immediately go to purchasing ILX a dedicated rack

― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Saturday, 23 August 2003 10:30 (twenty-two years ago)

thanks to sean and andrew.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Saturday, 23 August 2003 10:34 (twenty-two years ago)

kudos guys!!

― mitch lastnamewithheld (mitchlnw), Saturday, 23 August 2003 12:16 (twenty-two years ago)

And ilxor.com history was made this afternoon at 4pm Australian Eastern Standard Time as the ILX database was backed up for the first time ever.

Just thank black baby jesus that the hard drive didn't fail before now.

― Andrew (enneff), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 05:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, and for the tech heads out there who might be interested in how the archival of some 1gb of SQL databases was accomplished, I offer the following errata:

Initially, a few days ago, I tried performing a mysqldump of the database, piping it through a TCP tunnel (using netcat) to my laptop, where the dump would be stored. This seemed to be working okay, but when the messages database was being dumped mysqldump ate up all available memory (both physical and virtual) and promptly died. After cursing the stupidity of mysqldump's operation, I got back to my real (paid) work.

So today I decided to take a slightly different tack, and ran mysqldump on my laptop connecting remotely to the mysql daemon on the ILX server. This allowed the server to continue to operate essentially effortlessly while my laptop undertook the job of loading all 1192520 message records into memory and writing them to a file. For about ten minutes I watched the pagefile usage on my laptop climb steadily until it reached 519,036kb, plateau for a few minutes, then drop drastically as the dumpfile was written. During this whole operation the server's load average never rose far over 200%, which is pretty respectable.

This appears to be the optimal way of performing backups, and I'll try to do this every 2 weeks. The RAR-compressed archive of the current database is 119mb, so I guess I'll be able to fit 8-12 weeks worth of backups onto one CDR. Nice.

― Andrew (enneff), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 05:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Andrew, you rock!

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 05:44 (twenty-two years ago)

hey Andrew i saw you walking down queen st today. i went out to wave but you were walking too fast

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 05:53 (twenty-two years ago)

Was I carrying a brown paper bag? If so, then I was hurrying back to work to eat my spring rolls. If not, then I was hurrying to the shop to buy my spring rolls.

In any case, I think it's really fucked up that we live so close together and I never see you. We have to go out and do stuff.

― Andrew (enneff), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 06:15 (twenty-two years ago)

thanks andrew. hope you enjoyed those spring rolls.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 07:21 (twenty-two years ago)

Yay, cheers guys, you're great!

― Pinkpanther (Pinkpanther), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 07:43 (twenty-two years ago)

andrew, i'll buy you some spring rolls if i ever meet you.
sean, what would you like? pizza?
oh, and beers for both, of course!

― joan vich (joan vich), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 11:16 (twenty-two years ago)

In any case, I think it's really fucked up that we live so close together and I never see you. We have to go out and do stuff.

I'm telling you, it takes me visiting you people to get things to happen. ;-) And rah for the server news!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 12:16 (twenty-two years ago)

Three cheers for Andrew!

― amateurist (amateurist), Tuesday, 26 August 2003 13:28 (twenty-two years ago)

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