Server

[Drew Dowdell]

Made a tweak to the server settings at the recommendation of another webmaster who runs this same software. Please post here if you notice any unpleasantness in the site operation.

[Drew Dowdell]

had a disk fail today, site will be slow till fully fixed.

[Drew Dowdell]

We will be moved to a new disk array sometime over night. I will get further details on site outages when I have them.

[Drew Dowdell]

I will be pulling the server offline at midnight eastern. It is likely we will be down all night.

This will be an arduous process copying the data off as the disks the server is on are still in limp home mode.

Good news is, we're moving to a brand new server that hasn't been opened to the public yet, so we'll be pretty much alone there for a while. Should be an additional nice speed boost.

[Drew Dowdell]

5 minutes

[Robert Hall]

Bye bye

[G. David Felt]

SWEET, Nice and Speedy this morning

[Drew Dowdell]

yeah, the server migration didn't happen. the disk array was repaired.

I still may move the site, but I need to confer with the host a bit more. We're moving internally with-in the same hosting company so it isn't the same as our previous moves.

[G. David Felt]

We'll I will say you guys are doing an awesome job as the site just continues to get better and better.

[Drew Dowdell]

There is another server software update coming this week.

[G. David Felt]

Sweet, so any tid-bits you can share or like car anouncements you will keep us in suspense? New features or just updates for security and solidness?

[Drew Dowdell]

Archive System - The archive system offers a significant performance boost to large, established communities (like Cheers and Gears - DD) by allowing you to archive old content, keeping it accessible to users while moving it to a secondary storage location. With less active content in primary storage, features such as searching and content read markers receive noticable speed increases, and the general user experience within your community improves. And, of course, the archived content always remains available to users, both for browsing and searching, and can be moved back to primary storage at any time!

SEO system improvements - These help our standing in Google. The better we appear to Google, the more traffic we get. )A number of these improvements should boost our standing substantially because they remove a lot of the "fluff" words like Forum, Posts, Thread that Google counts as important, but really aren't.

Auto Share - New in IP.Board 3.3, users have the ability to share content they post with social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. (Connect your facebook and/or Twitter accounts to your C&G account for easy log in!

Performance improvements on the back end - They've made some substantial changes in the way the database operates to make the system a lot less heavy, giving us more headroom before our next server upgrade. In fact, we might even turn the server down a bit to save some money.

IP.Content - Substantial changes to the IP.Content system, this is the news articles app that runs our front page.

[G. David Felt]

Sweet Updates, thanks for sharing.

[Drew Dowdell]

Well, that old chestnut of a bum hard drive is back. The replacement server is up and running, but we're not moved over to it yet. I did some hard drive speed tests on the new server and the hard drives there are roughly 20 times the speed of our existing congested drives. All I have to do is mirror the data over and we should be set. It takes a few hours, so there will be some down time over the weekend.

[Drew Dowdell]

on the new server with healthy and fast new drives!

[Drew Dowdell]

After running months without a hiccup, the server was able to detect when I was exactly mid-point between Key West and Miami on US-1 with no cellular signal and choose THAT time for the disks to take a dump. We're back up now and the file damage has been repaired. A few posts close to the time the server went down may have been lost. You may see some slowness for the next few hours while the disks finish their rebuild.

[Robert Hall]

After running months without a hiccup, the server was able to detect when I was exactly mid-point between Key West and Miami on US-1 with no cellular signal and choose THAT time for the disks to take a dump. We're back up now and the file damage has been repaired. A few posts close to the time the server went down may have been lost. You may see some slowness for the next few hours while the disks finish their rebuild.

Cool...you probably drove across the Seven Mile Bridge and through my old hometown of Marathon. The Keys are a very special place.

[Drew Dowdell]

Sorry about the downtime over the past day. The drives were continuing to be an issue. We have been moved to a completely new drive array, but there may still be some reboots between now and tomorrow morning.

[Drew Dowdell]

My grandmother could run a more reliable web hosting company than this.... arg

[G. David Felt]

Out of Curiosity, who is the web hosting company?

[Drew Dowdell]

Vps.net we stick with them due to the huge flexibility they offer.

[ocnblu]

ohhhh... Very Poor Service. net. I haven't heard of those fellas.

[G. David Felt]

Vps.net we stick with them due to the huge flexibility they offer.

Interesting, I am with GoDaddy and been pretty happy. I see they are a big international hosting company. I am surprised they have outage issues.

[Drew Dowdell]

GoDaddy is a different kind of host. C&G is too big and bulky to run on that style of server. That said, we're going to have to move. We've had 4 major outages in 45 days, none of which were our fault.

[G. David Felt]

GoDaddy is a different kind of host. C&G is too big and bulky to run on that style of server. That said, we're going to have to move. We've had 4 major outages in 45 days, none of which were our fault.

Wow, that is pretty sad to have that many outages in 45 days.

[Drew Dowdell]

As mentioned before, we will be moving servers. The new server is being prepared now. We are getting a minor upgrade in RAM but a major upgrade in Disk as we are moving from a standard disk RAID to an SSD raid. This should hopefully improve the performance of the site substantially. As a nice bonus, server costs will be cut in half (yay for coupon codes!).

Once the migration to the new server is complete, there will also be a few software upgrades to the script that runs CheersandGears.com. I have already added a blogging module that you can see above and any registered user can now start their own blog on C&G.

Also coming after the site move is a new Advertising system allowing me to sell advertising directly rather than just going through an ad exchange.

I don't have exact timing as to when these changes go in... so if you see the "We're Moving" sign, please just be patient, we'll be back online shortly.

[G. David Felt]

As mentioned before, we will be moving servers. The new server is being prepared now. We are getting a minor upgrade in RAM but a major upgrade in Disk as we are moving from a standard disk RAID to an SSD raid. This should hopefully improve the performance of the site substantially. As a nice bonus, server costs will be cut in half (yay for coupon codes!).

Once the migration to the new server is complete, there will also be a few software upgrades to the script that runs CheersandGears.com. I have already added a blogging module that you can see above and any registered user can now start their own blog on C&G.

Also coming after the site move is a new Advertising system allowing me to sell advertising directly rather than just going through an ad exchange.

I don't have exact timing as to when these changes go in... so if you see the "We're Moving" sign, please just be patient, we'll be back online shortly.

Your Awesome Drew!!!

[Drew Dowdell]

The new server is up and running and configured. I will probably be doing the migration this weekend.

[Drew Dowdell]

Server upgrades and updates over the weekend. We're keeping Christmas light this year so I have a lot of free time and our traffic is typically low right around the holiday. Don't be alarmed if you see the site down. I'm probably just tinkering on it with my elves.

[G. David Felt]

Very Cool Santa!, Have those elves work hard to beat the dark side!

[Drew Dowdell]

Feel the speed of SSD RAID!

Further software upgrades will continue this weekend.

[FAPTurbo]

Oh boy! -1'ing people's posts will register three-tenth's of a second faster!

[Robert Hall]

I notice the notification emails are working again now....had a bunch of them this morning, haven't seen them in months.

[G. David Felt]

Over all I do love the responsiveness of the site.

[Drew Dowdell]

There is still some tuning to be done as it is an entirely new server, but I'm not messing with it on sales release day.

[Delta Force79]

I've noticed in the last week or so that the side-bar on the main forums that contained the various sections for the garage and tid-bits is missing. I'm not sure if this is an issue that has sprung up due to an error in my browser ( Chrome) or a design change to the forum.

[Drew Dowdell]

No, you're right it is missing. I'm not going to bother to diagnose until the software updates are complete.

I'm going to do the updates in a few minutes rather than wait till the weekend.

[Delta Force79]

Good to know its not a Chrome issue then, as I've been having trouble using Twitter on Chrome and have had to go back to Firefox to view Twitter when I'm bored.

[Drew Dowdell]

I gotta say, the new auto upgrader for the software ROCKS! This is a feature they just recently introduced..... normally it takes me hours to get the software updated, this took less than 1!

[G. David Felt]

Glad to hear it works so well, Saw we had a SQL issue last night as the site did not respond from home.

[Drew Dowdell]

That was just me trying to tune stuff.... I have to turn the SQL server off to do it.

[G. David Felt]

Very cool good to know that tuning requires taking the SQL server offline.

[Drew Dowdell]

There is still more tuning to do, even though this is more hardware than we used to be on, performance seems to be pokey.....

[Drew Dowdell]

Made a tweak to the server configuration last night because even after the upgrade and move to SSD, the site felt sluggish. It seems waaaaay faster to me now. How about you guys?

[bobo]

Much better. It was getting painfully slow.