Forum:Upgrades!

All right, so some major upgrades are coming. And they are coming tomorrow cause I just want to get it over with.

Two major hardware upgrades are incoming, as well as substantial changes to the underlying software.

First we will be doubling our current RAM from 2gb to 4gb.

Second we are installing a new harddrive, our existing one is now close to 6-7 years old and we need an upgrade. Our new one has various improvements to speed up access time, as well as substantially more space (we will be running on a terabyte instead of 300 gigs).

In addition to these upgrades we will be taking this opportunity to make multiple upgrades to the software underlying the server. We will be installing the latest version of ubuntu, we will be installing a 64 bit operating system instead of our current 32, we will also be updating a range of products that support the website in various fashions.

I am the type that just wants to pull the band-aid off quickly so lets just do this. I will be aiming for tomorrow afternoon EST. Be prepared for downtime. Updates will be at the tech blog.

This is a fairly major undertaking because we are transferring to a new HDD and updating a ton of software. It needs to be done. It will help improve performance over all, and during traffic spikes, and allow us to continue to operate as growth continues.

Side note: I have "fronted" for the costs of the hardware, if you haven't donated to rationalwiki in a while, or perhaps never, and you have a few buck lying around now would be a good time to toss a little our way. We have many other things in the works as well that need some financial backing which I will talk about as they come up. tmtoulouse 00:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * That's good to hear!  00:44, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Question: Since bandwidth use has repeatedly come up in site discussions, will you be needing to upgrade your internet service as well?   00:46, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I am capped for upload speed. tmtoulouse 00:46, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Not to be a pain by asking so many questions, but are we saturating the upload limit? And how big of an issue is it/will it be?   00:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * There are issues with upload speed and concurrent connections with my ISP. They become an issue when we have 5-10k people trying to access the site with in a short time frame like we did this week. I doubt we will be having sustained traffic that taxes my internet connection for a while yet. By the time we do I think we will be in a position to do something more about than we are now. tmtoulouse 00:55, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I see. Thank you for responding—and for everything else you do for this site!   00:57, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I love you Trent! 01:11, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Me too! :D Refugee talk page 01:13, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Well I love Trent so much that I've just donated $15 to RW! (I didn't go out boozing tonight so it's only fair) 01:31, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm right at the end of the school year, so I don't have much money left. I'll toss some your way once I'm working, if that helps.  Hopefully the office temp market won't be as dry as last year. --Kels (talk) 01:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * drats. now I feel all guilty and stuff... next paycheck for sure though! :D Refugee talk page 01:50, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Holy crap—you guys' got jobs? All bow before the ruling class!   01:55, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh no, you would not want my job. Boring doesn't begin to describe it. I basically push piles of papers around, stack them in various piles, restack, sort, type a few details in the computer, then pretend to be busily typing more info whilst I surf the web, bid on items at ebay and email friends. Refugee talk page 01:59, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I actually enjoy office work.  02:01, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Fingers crossed for Trent on gutting the server. I really would chip with a bailout package, but, as has been said, end of the (academic) year, no damn joy at all with temp work, and my bank wants to levy charge me for the privilege of not having money in my account :( --[[Image:TheEgyptiansig001.png|link=User:TheEgyptian]] 07:21, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Why only 64 bits? I heard that more bits make the computer faster. Heck, my old analog modem has more bits than that. --78.13.141.230 (talk) 09:45, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * This site is growing rapidly! Thanks a lot Trent, we all appreciate it. Hopefully I should be coming into some money in the next month (like Kels, end of the academic year, now looking for work) and when I do I'll throw some your way. 11:27, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Expect delays, unfortunately, I will toss out an intercom message an hour or so before I plan to bring the site down. tmtoulouse 16:01, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Updates
The memory is installed, and while we can't access all of it yet, we are getting an extra gig and half so that will help.

As for the HDD and software upgrades, after doing some bench testing I have decided to go a completely different direction with this.

We don't need much space really, so I made a deal to swap out the new drive and a little more money for a smaller, but much faster drive. This likely means that the actual swap won't happen this weekend but probably next.
 * Ooh! Is it an SSD, or one of the new Velociraptors?   20:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Aren't Seven-Segment Displays a bit outdated? --78.13.141.230 (talk) 21:26, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * No, not really, when all that is required is display of numbers (a clock for instance). 21:29, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You mean there are still clocks around that aren't built into mobile phones? --78.13.141.230 (talk) 21:33, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes. Hell, one of my cars has an analog clock!  21:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You're kidding me. Next thing you're gonna tell me that this car of yours also has a fossil fuel engine and four wheels generating propulsion by means of friction. --78.13.141.230 (talk) 22:34, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * No, silly, a solid state drive.  21:41, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * How about a Liquid State Drive? --78.13.141.230 (talk) 22:34, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Did somebody call? -- PsyGremlin  22:35, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Cool. I was wondering about the need for a TB when the data dump is under 20 GB.  20:11, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Bigger drives are generally faster. That may have been part of the reason for him considering one.   21:41, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Cheers Guv. The site seems pretty snappy. Any chance you could let us know how the funds are going? It'd be a bugger if you're left out of pocket during this upgrade. --[[Image:Concrnedresident logo.png|140px|link=User:Concernedresident|Concernedresident|baseline]]Ask me about our book 13:24, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I will have more details on the specs for the drive when I pick it up. I cut a deal with the local shop here on a shipment they are getting Tuesday or Wednesday. As for funding, there have been a couple donations but I am still out of pocket most of the costs so far. I will drop a request in a more high traffic spot eventually. At the moment I am okay because it is the beginning of the month, it is the last week of the month when I realize I shouldn't have spent all that money 3 weeks ago that leads to the raman noodles! tmtoulouse 13:31, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

1.16 and SVG skin
When are we going to do this already? I have been looking at RationalWiki Beta and I want it so much. 02:28, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * It's called vector
 * MW 1.16 isn't out yet
 * Liquidthreads is still buggy.
 * DPL has problems with MW 1.16 and I haven't tested it yet. -- Nx  / talk 02:34, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I like that when Nx upgrades the site nothing is broken. Due diligence and careful programming deserves a starnbar.  03:23, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I've been messing with MW 1.16b2 at work (office intranet). It's good but beta. I hit a very simple installer bug, for example, and was apparently the first person to hit it. RC at the very earliest for public use. I fear MW 1.16.0 is going to be just a bit brown-bag - David Gerard (talk) 11:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * What's "brown-bag" mean?  22:52, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Definition 10 -- Nx  / talk 22:57, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * It's what you put your head into if you were release engineer, or your stomach contents if you're a user - David Gerard (talk) 23:11, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Upgrade part 2
Okay, I am now in possession of our next hard drive (WD1500HLFS)! I will work on getting the base operating system and software installed, and the plan is roughly to be able to drop it into the server, copy over the files and database and be up and running. This, in theory, will minimize downtime on RW itself. But we are making a lot of changes and so the probability of my hypothesis being true depends on the priors you assign particularly to  competing hypotheses. tmtoulouse 23:00, 5 May 2010 (UTC)


 * So what was suppose to happen was that I could setup everyone on one machine, transfer the drive, and it would boot and be accessible. Yesterday was the test of that theory. Unfortunately it turned out to not quiet work that way as everyone found out. The drive was unable to recognize the network and so I made the decision to move forward with an installation of the OS based off the server while I had things hooked up. Well it didn't all go very smoothly, its not an "easy" job trying to clone settings from one OS to another. Since we are upgrading all the underlying software, just copying configuration files doesn't usually work. However, I did get things to appear to be working, so where we are at now the new drive has a working OS and appears to have all the correct settings from the old server making everything accessible via the internet.
 * That took 6 hours. I then made the decision to just boot back into the old drive and this weekend I will attempt to finalize the move which involves copying all the files and databases over. tmtoulouse 17:31, 6 May 2010 (UTC)