ehMac.ca Announcement - Upgrades and intermittent downtime on weekend, Nov 10-11

ehMax · Nov 7th, 2007, 01:02 PM

There will be some downtime and some intermittent downtime this weekend, on Saturday, November 10th-11th.

During this time, ehMac.ca will be moving to an even more powerful dedicated server with faster processors and more RAM. We outgrew our previous dedicated server a little faster than we thought. In order to save some

, we also shared some resources with a couple other sites, and now we'll be completely on our own again. Our DNS will have to be changed, so that usually takes about 24 hours to spread across the web, so for a short period of time some users will be directed to the new server while others will see the old server.

During the last time we moved servers, there was a glitch that made the process take a lot longer. That shouldn't happen this time.

Why are we doing this? Over the last several months, ehMac.ca's traffic has quadrupled. Part of the reason for this, is that there is software that makes threads and posts on ehMac.ca much more prominent on search sites like Google etc.. This takes up much more resources, and we need a faster computer, with more ram etc..

This will in part, get rid of many of the double posting problems we've been having, and failed attempts to post a new thread.

The other thing we will be doing is some updates to the software that runs ehMac.ca. These updates will consist of security patches etc... without any real big changes to the ehMac.ca users interface. Were moving to PHP 5 and some other technical things to.

We are also contracting out a coder to look over ehMac.ca, and make sure things are as optimized as possible and secure, and that none of the problems are caused by code issues. (A few months ago, I updated some of ehMac's software by myself, and this may have been not the smartest move.)

Hopefully, this should make for a much faster, problem free site and give us the headroom we need.

Nov 7th, 2007, 02:38 PM

Thanks for the heads up ehMax. Hope things work out well for us all!

PHP5 ... fun

Word of advice: avoid MySQL 5! Lots and lots of horror stories with it (still). I've personally seen a lot of people lose serious amounts of data with big projects like VB that are not quite ready for it :/

duosonic · Nov 7th, 2007, 02:46 PM

Thanks for the warning, and thanks for all your dedication and hard work!!

MasterBlaster · Nov 7th, 2007, 04:21 PM

.

ehMax · Nov 7th, 2007, 04:50 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by MasterBlaster
	Thanks Mr. Mayor This site is so awesome. Thanks for putting in the effort for even more improvements.

Well, I'm really just getting my but in gear and fixing problems I should of addressed awhile back, but thanks for the compliment.

As the weather gets colder, I tend to want to go outside less and hybernate in my den downstairs, and start working on ehMac.ca more.

MacDoc · Nov 7th, 2007, 04:59 PM

Just so people know - the Dawkins forum site with about 10k members and top count of 142 online at once also has similar issues and they started having issues at about the same time as ehMac.

	Quote:
	Go to RichardDawkins.net In total there are 91 users online :: 47 registered, 9 hidden and 35 guests Most users ever online was 142 on Tue Nov 06, 2007 7:05 pm Total posts 487538 \| Total topics 24168 \| Total members 19737 \| Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group

Nov 7th, 2007, 10:57 PM

Yep it's a new hole in VB apparently ... that's one of the bad things about having things like these in your footer (and having good SEO!):

"Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.5", "Powered by: PhotoPost Classifieds 2.42 vB3 Enhanced"

Combine that with google + it's a invitation for any wannabe that runs across an exploit script for a spcific forum version. Add in any keywords that scammers are looking for to hit the right targets ... like iPhone or iPod .. and scammers and spammers get attracted like magnets too

Might be worth considering come tweaking time on the upgrades ehMax

ehMax · Nov 9th, 2007, 09:23 AM

Just a reminder that this is happening on the weekend. (I don't have the exact times)

New server is put together I'm told. I splurged a little and got dual SCSI drives.

HowEver · Nov 9th, 2007, 09:30 AM

Reaches for schedule of events that take place 'outside' ....

MacDoc · Nov 9th, 2007, 10:09 AM

	Quote:
	I splurged a little and got dual SCSI drives.

This is one situation where the high two way i/o traffic channels on scsi pays off.
Good choice