(Almost) Scheduled Maintenance

[Martin]

On Tuesday this week (August 25th, 2009) we are planning to move this site, the blog, the workshops site and the mbpgalleries site to a new server. It's just a change of hardware, to get a little bit more power and disk space (for roughly the same price ).

This means that I'll have to take the forum, galleries and blog offline, or make then read-only where possible, until the move is completed. As I will be in bed when the majority of the work is done, it will probably take a few hours longer than it needs to re-open things up, but don't worry. This is all planned, and will hopefully go relatively smoothly (famous last words!!).

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Update] This is being pushed back by a day. I'll try to update you again when I get a new schedule from my providers.

[ptruman]

Hope it goes well Martin - the number of times I've heard "it's just a change of ..." and it turns out to be somewhat more complex

As ever, the 6P rule - Prior Planning Prevents P*** Poor Performance. Given how much of a site you now have and the industry you work in, I'm sure you have the battle scars and have thought it all through!

[Martin]

The 6 Ps, right. I remember that one.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I won't have much to do with the transfer. I rent dedicated servers, so the maintenance is always up to me, but for a total move to a new server, my providers have offered to do it all for me. I just have a few things to do, and then test that things look good before we flick the switch to move traffic to the new server. If they do as good a job as they are assuring me they will, it should all be very smooth.

We both know that this is wishful thinking of course.

[nygorilla]

flick the switch

- I love that.

"Its easy, let me show you, I'll draw it on a whiteboard." ...is what one of my customers used to say.

Hopefully it all goes well and you are not rebuilding things similar to the last server transfer if I recall correctly.

[Martin]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed too.

Having said that, the transition that was put off from Monday didn't happen yesterday either, and the provider has gone quiet. They needn't think they're going to mess my weekend up this week. We have family coming over, so I will not be pleased if that happens. Neither will my wife.

[Martin]

The outage over the last eight hours was not related to this (almost) scheduled maintenance. The server just froze again. The second time in a couple of months. I hope my new hardware, when we finally get there, is better than now.

[Pixelated]

You are having problems.
Are you running all this on your own server? Or is it the ISP's server with the problem?

[Martin]

I have two dedicated servers in a facility in Florida. Basically they are like rented hardware. There's no one else on either box. One is for the audio files, and the other houses all of the domains.