New Server, New Problems Come Gratis!

Tessil

Well, I've finally gotten around to putting the old dog out of it's misery.

Over time, the Sun SPARC UltraServer 2 that has been the Guild's Web site for many years, has started to develop SCSI bus errors during the boot process. Admittedly, it's doggedly persistent, and always seems to make it through. But those sort of errors tend to accumulate, and eventually they'll come to the point the server won't boot again.

Since Oracle has pulled free binary support, and the SPARC architechture is no longer supported by most distros, I don't really have an upgrade path for the server, and replacement parts (especially SCSI hard drives), are realtively quite expensive.

So, I've gotten a spiffy new 1U rackmount server, based off of an Intel D525MW board. So, that's 1.8GHz dual-core and 4GB of RAM, facing off against the 400MHz dual-processor and 2GB RAM of the old UltraServer 2. It's... not much of a contest. The other benefit is that the Intel Atom board sips power rather lightly as compared to the quite industrial Sun. As Summer is already here, less power in == less heat out. Which is a double savings on my electric bill.

As you can see, everything should be migrated over, we're still using the same DragonflyCMS system the Guild is accustomed to, and I've migrated over the database, so everything should be intact. You really shouldn't even notice the change...

...except when you do.

It's taken me a couple of days to perform the migration, which actually took less time and frustration than I anticipated (although it wasn't free of it). I've spot-tested features, and already found and fixed a problem with the DragonflyCMS database. But I wouldn't be surprised if I missed something.

Help me out and let me know if you encounter problems with the new server. I'll be sure to look into it ASAP.