New server upgrade complete (Read 2619 times)

Good afternoon everyone! I switched RA to a new server last night. Despite all my preparations, several unforeseen problems cropped up during the upgrade. They did not affect the data integrity, just required a lot more time to work around. All the data have transferred correctly. There were several configuration issues that I missed, causing the pages to be formated incorrectly. I have since fixed these problems and everything should be the same as before the upgrade, except for a noticeably better response time. The new server has more tools to help me analyze server performance. It's obvious now that the upgrade is long over due since the new server is still constantly busy. The server should be good for a couple of years. After that, I may need to look into getting a second one. It's not a bad problem to have. Anyway, please let me know if you encounter any problems. A big thank you to the beta testers for testing out the new server. Thank you to Brian and Scott who spent their Monday night and early Tuesday morning with me in a cold and loud data center swapping out the server. I couldn't have done it without you guys. Thanks! eric :-)

Great job, Eric and Co. Everything looks fines, and it's much faster!

Bah! I preferred the old, slower server and the longer wait times. All this obsession with speed, reliability and data integrity -- humbug, I say! Seriously, excellent job on the upgrade eric. Thanks again for your unbelievable commitment to the site.

Hey eric.... I can tell you that I have a complete test environment and so before I do a full conversion, I test the procedure at leat 2 times and sometimes more time to ensure it will work without error (to work out all the bugs). Of course the idea is to have a perfectly smooth transfer to the new server and to foresee all the issues...... I can do these things in test - no sweat...and then when I do the production system....there are always issues and little bugs and silly little problem that make you old before your time..........happens every single time... Good job ....its not as easy to do a data coversion as it looks.....JohnA

John, The server backs up the database every night. I used one of those backups as my upgrade test. It went smoothly. The estimated time to import the data into the new server was about 20 minutes. The original plan was to bring an external drive to transfer the database between the two machines. I shut down the site and initialized a backup using the db's export tool before leaving for the data center. It took a while to swap out the server, which was expected. I copied the exported db to the external drive but when I moved the drive over to the new server, I wasn't able to copy the db. The server actually locked up and no one knew why. I tried it another time and determined that there was something wrong with the external drive. I got my hands on a memory stick and used that to copy the db over. When I started the import, the import tool estimated 22 hours to complete, far from the 20 minutes I've been getting. Turned out the db's exporter tool generates a SQL script that inserts each row individually, where as the script I wrote to backup the db does a bulk insert. So I turned the old server back on and exported the db using my own script. After some 30 minutes, the db was imported into the new server but I can't bring the server up. It took a while to track down the config problem (difference in db passwords). It's just all these little problems that added enough delays to the upgrade that it took much longer than I expected. Oh well. Live and learn.

FYI: did the refresh on Firefax (Shift and reload). all is well again thanks

Thanks so much for all the hard work and energy you've put into this site, Eric!