Well, here we go again. Yet another attempt at making things run smoothly on the new server. As you might guess by the title of the message, I've moved the forums to the new server once again, with a rather different configuration this time and I'm hopeful that the third time is the charm and that the problems we experienced are a thing of the past. Only time will tell.

For the time being, only the web interface to the forums is on the new server, the database is still running on the old server and will continue to do so for at least a couple of days while I satisfy myself that the server is reasonably stable in this configuration. If all goes well over that time, I will attempt to move the database over to this server as well, and we'll let that run for a few days more for stability testing before moving on to additional Dumpshock sites and services. Keep your fingers crossed and be sure to report any oddities that you see in the Bug Reports forum.

Once again, thanks to everyone for their patience and support.

Now, for the technically minded, a quick rundown on how things are configured:

The server is a Dell Poweredge SC1425 with two 2,8 GHz Xeon processors, 2GB of ECC DDR2 memory, and 2 160GB SATA disk drives. The system is only using the first drive and the second is used for exclusively for backups.

We are currently running Fedora Core 4 with the Xen virtualization package with a couple of virtual servers: dodger.dumpshock.com and flux.dumpshock.com. Dodger is the image that is currently running the forums, and Flux is currently idle awaitinig additional attention and software installs. I'll be trying to partition things in this manner as much as makes sense in order to isolate any potential problems (ie: don't want IRC server issues to cause trouble for the forums or vice versa). I don't plan to take this to extremes though, since I have to maintain each of these server images and I don't get paid for this.

If anyone has any specific questions or just wants to geek out, I'm more than willing to continue this discussion.

The server has been stable up to this point so I moved the database from the old server over to the new one. At this point we're 100% on the new hardware for the forums -- and it looks like I'm getting quicker at this too, that was less than a 5 minute outage.

Keep your fingers crossed.

so far so good.
Thanks for your dedication Neuron Basher, it is appreciated.

Well, Dodger has been running with the database with no problems for 48 hours now, so I'm cautiously optimistic that our persistent system lockups are now just a bad memory. I plan to start moving additional services to the server within the next couple of days, so things are definitely looking up.

Yay!

I'm officially declaring victory over this phase of the transition. Dodger has been up and running for the better part of 8 days without difficulty now, so I think we're past the initial problems (finally!). In the next few weeks most of the Dumpshock services will be making the move to their new, plusher, home.