Site upgrades

Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:48:29 GMT

I just finished upgrading the hardware that runs this blog. Everything tests okay, and the logs look clean, but major upgrades always make me nervous.

As I’ve mentioned before, this site was running on a 700 MHz Athlon for years. That worked fine when there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic, but I’ve kept adding new services and sites over the years, and it all adds up eventually. The poor little Athlon has been running for 42 days since it’s last reboot, and it’s averaged nearly 50% CPU utilization the entire time.

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes it slow also makes it hard to upgrade–the poor little system runs a dozen websites, acts as my home router, runs Asterisk, and handles email for at least three domains. It’s been up and running since May of 2000, so there are probably minor services that I’ve completely forgotten about over the years. Frankly, if someone handed me this as a project at work and said “fix it,” I’d probably run screaming.

I have a three-phase plan for fixing things:

  1. Outsource as much as possible. For instance, I’ve stopped using my local IMAP mail server and switched to Google Apps for Your Domain. I still have SMTP and mailing lists running locally, but they’re a lot easier to maintain.
  2. Move each service on the old system onto its own Xen virtual machine on a new Athlon X2 3800+ system. This should be a bit easier to maintain then just lumping everything onto one single Linux system, and it has 6x the CPU power and 4x the RAM of the old system.
  3. Once everything is migrated, all that will be left on the old system is routing and my firewall. I’ll migrate that onto something less power-hungry; I’m not sure what yet.

At of about a half hour ago, this blog is now running on the new system. It should be substantially faster then before, especially since it currently has the entire X2 to itself. I’m planning on upgrading it to the Typo trunk in a few days, but I don’t like making too many upgrades all at once.

Update: Well that was fun. I’ve had the new box running quietly under a desk for over a month without problems. A couple hours after I move traffic onto it, one of the hard drives failed, killing the system. I’m not quite sure how that happened–it’s running RAID 1. Even better, Xen’s network configuration script only works correctly for me on every second boot. Some days I just love computers.

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Xen boots

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:13:05 GMT

I finally have Xen 2.0.7 booting on my home test server. Xen is an open-source virtualization system, sort of like VMWare. I've been half-heartedly trying to get it to work on this system since March, but the hardware is a bit weird, and Xen versions before 2.0.6 didn't want to boot at all on it. I could get the Xen 2.0.6 CD to boot, mostly, but it kept dying with weird errors when I tried to boot from the hard drive, and I didn't have enough time to debug it. Xen 2.0.7 finally seems to work right.

I'm planning on setting up a couple virtual machines today, hopefully everything will keep working. I need a couple test hosts for various Typo-related activities, plus some development space for my little virtualization project.

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Xen, finally

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:10:19 GMT

I finally have Xen working on a system at home. I hadn’t expected this to be very difficult, but apparently Xen doesn’t like my new Athlon 64 system (bought mostly for running Xen). They’ll fix it eventually, but for now I’m using an old Athlon 700 system that I had sitting around. It needed a new CPU fan (just try finding Slot A fans these days!), but I was able to scrounge up 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive, so it’s perfectly usable.

I built a couple quick disk images and booted them under Xen, and everything worked as expected. This is always a good sign, and it suggests that I’ll be able to make progress on my little virtual-server project without a whole lot of trouble.

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Xen and lightweight virtual servers

Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:36:14 GMT

I’ve been watching Xen for a while now, and I’m nearly ready to take the jump and do some testing with it. I’m thinking about ordering a cheap Athlon 64 box for home to use as a testbed for the lightweight server concept that I’ve been kicking around for years. In the 18 months that have passed since I last talked about it, virtualization on the PC has advanced by leaps and bounds; at the time, I was looking at UML, which wasn’t really fast or stable enough. Xen looks to be both fast and stable, and it has a clear migration path onto the virtualization hardware offered by the next generation of PC hardware. That makes it nearly ideal for my purposes.

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