The decommissioning of one, barclay, bidwell and haro

So this is parts 1 and 2 of a 4 part announcement (more in a few days)

Part I: The decommissioning of one, barclay, bidwell and haro.

First off, sorry for the two week delay in addressing this again. As we’ve discussed, one.textdrive.com and barclay.textdrive.com were our first two servers, and physically they happen to be one “tower” and one “rack”, and both are running FreeBSD 4. The delay has been in getting all the new hardware in one place, connected up to each other and then running things through tests so that there is no downtime during the moves.

_[Warning: some geek details follow]_ What we’ve been doing is putting in a series of servers like nelson and pendrell, these are Dual 3.6 Ghz Dell 2850s with a “split backplane” arrangement of their hard drives: the operating system and binaries are on a RAID1 (fully redundant) set of 73GB SCSI drives and /home/ is a RAID5 array of SCSI disks. This both provides an additional speed boost to binary execution and makes the system doubly redundant (one disk for the system can fail and one+ in the /home/ can die without losses or real degradation). The other purpose is so that we can connect the new servers to another cluster of databases servers and dedicated email servers. These new servers are even in an entirely different class than our year-old 2650s, and we’ll continue to see ever more dramatic improvements as the databases and emails are off-loaded onto their own systems.

This week, we’re syncing all of the contents off of one and barclay onto one-new and barclay-new, renaming them (one and barclay, and one-old and barclay-old), and then updating everyone’s DNS records. Our nameservers are a distributed set of MySQL-backed nameservers and the changes will be instant, and hopefully with our <20 minute TTL (“Time To Live”), then your more local system caches should also quickly flush out. If you maintain your own DNS records with a third party, then you’ll need to update your IP addresses. The goal is to have the old servers around for another 2 weeks, with everyone still having full access to one-old and barclay-old.

One.textdrive.com (primary IP of 67.18.181.68) will become

Server Name: one-new.textdrive.com
Main IP: 70.84.207.130
Other IPs: 70.84.207.132 – 158

Barclay.textdrive.com (primary IP of 67.18.181.69) will become

Server Name: barclay-new.textdrive.com
Main IP: 70.84.207.162
Other IPs: 70.84.207.164 – 190

Your current passwords and configurations will be entirely the same, and we’ll be handling the initial and maintenance syncs. We will sync and then test many sites on the new servers before any kind of change. For one and barclay the upgrade to FreeBSD 5.3 should not be noticable except that multiprocessor handling is much better, but two critical differences for most people here is that your default PHP will be PHP5 and MySQL will be up to 4.1. These shouldn’t affect many sites (Textpattern, Wordress, MovableType driven sites will all be fine) other than having to perhaps reset user passwords in applications like Textpattern (and we’re making movie tutorials of how this is done in case you have any issues) and if you maintain your own php.ini, then you will need to upgrade those to a PHP5 one.

Once one and barclay are completed over this week, we’ll also be syncing everyone off of bidwell onto a new 2850 as well.

Bidwell.textdrive.com (primary IP of 70.85.29.68) will become:

Server Name: burnaby.textdrive.com
Main IP: 70.84.207.226
Other IPs: 70.84.207.228 – 254

The software configurations between bidwell and burnaby are nearly identical, it’s just a solid hardware upgrade and moving everyone into the “cluster”. Bidwell will still be around for 2 weeks after the move and you’ll have the same access to it that you do now.

Part 2: A bit about the future

And speaking of “clusters”, that’s the next step after this. We’ve been setting up our system so that all authentications and configurations are actually in MySQL, this is helps in putting together a solid “TextPanel”, but what is also allows for is a true cluster configuration that hasn’t really existed in shared hosting before. The introduction of TextPanel will move most of the authentication off of the server that your site is physically on, and then allow for web-databases-email to be separated from each other, and finally all we have to do is then seemlessly move /home/ onto redundant storage arrays and then requests to any site can be routed through and shared among servers like “one”, “barclay”,”bidwell”, “nelson” ... and we’d have an excellent level of redundancy, failproofing and performance that’s only made possible by this scale.

And I want to say that our entire goal for this is to minimize if not eliminate you having to do anything, or even noticing that changes have occurred. The only thing you should notice in the future is the 100% absence of problems.

·:· Posted 19 April 2005, 10:04 by Jason Hoffman to About TextDrive  |  

  1. Thanks very much for the update Jason, and thx to the team for building such an impressive set :) This is all really exciting !

    — davidm    19 April 2005, 12:23    #
  2. That’s great news. I love the Future.

    — MT    19 April 2005, 14:04    #
  3. Just to be clear. If my DNS settings currently point to ns*.textdrive.com then I am all set, yes? Great news, thanks for the update!

    — Alex    19 April 2005, 14:18    #
  4. Yes Alex.

    — Jason Hoffman    19 April 2005, 15:48    #
  5. Great news. Thanks for the update.

    — Colin    19 April 2005, 16:02    #
  6. That’s great!

    — Oliver    19 April 2005, 19:10    #
  7. Good news! I was wondering if I’d have to beg to get moved to a new machine or something :)

    — Chris L    20 April 2005, 06:17    #
  8. Bidwell -> Barnaby? How come? Why not
    bidwell-old/new as the others? It kind of messes up some things: If you wanted to use SSL for email, you had to use bidwell.textdrive.com to not
    get a certificate mismatch (mail.domain.tld didn’t work with thunderbird).

    — Marco    20 April 2005, 13:06    #
  9. Where are parts 3&4 ? :)

    — Jérémie    21 April 2005, 05:32    #
  10. Another clarification please: should I be using DNS settings ns*.textdrive.com or dns*.textdrive.com ? Are they the same thing?

    Cheers, and thanks for the good work being done.

    — Simon    21 April 2005, 08:23    #