FreeSide On The Web

From my last post, you will know we gained some SpiderPort Atoms which we intend to roll out as soon as possible. However these spider ports run on 10BaseT network connections, which is to slow to use them as part of the network backbone. So, we’ve decided to add a second network card in each server and use that for the SpiderPort.

Unfortunately, our spare network cards are not always that reliable and as such, it may take time to get each server back up and running. Service will therefore be somewhat sporadic, to keep up with what servers are up and which are down, check out our Twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/freeside.

Many thanks to Radius Solutions (http://www.radiussolutions.com) for their donation and thanks to John for setting it up. Unfortunately, (in the loosest way) we couldn’t fit everything in my car and will require a second trip. Out of the haul, items to note:

• HP tower server
• HP UPS
• 9 Ethernet Hubs
• 3 SpiderPorts
• 3 Other PC
• 1 laptop

These will all come in very handy in the near future. Once again. Thanks.

Some people (specifically those with usernames containing underscores) may have noticed that they could not log into the FreeSide wiki (http://wiki.freeside.co.uk). This was due to MediaWiki stripping out underscores from the username before authentication.

This has now been sorted and all users can now log in as expected.

Thanks.

A lot of time this year (as well as a fair bit of money) has gone on system redundancy and data backups. Setting up FS based data was easy thanks to a couple of new hard drives and a bit of RAID goodness. MySQL however, has always caused a bit of an issue.

MySQL AB, came up with 2 forms of data backup and redundancy. The first one we tried was MySQL cluster. Even though this is now included in the main distributions of MySQL server, Cluster itself seems to be years off having a usable product(especially for Not For Profit projects such as FreeSide), however, it has an excellent base to move on from and has many advantages. Unfortunately it requires too much hardware and cannot support some of the packages we use as they are not compatible with the NDB engine at the time of writing.

The second is replication, basically a copy of all databases from one Master server to a slave server. This may sound no better that simple copy and paste, however, there is a lot more depth than that which is beyond the scope of this post. As an added incentive (as with cluster) it will be possible to use this secondary system as service redundency for MySQL so downtime at any one MySQL failure should be minimal and recoverable.

Winters nearly over, spring is nearly here and it was about time that FreeSide abided by the time honoured tradition of Spring Cleaning.

It took all of the Christmas holidays to arrange the disposal of all the useless equipment that FreeSide has accumulated over the last year or so and now we have finally managed to move most of the junk out. So on Tuesday, the task was for me to move 20 monitors of varying size from the Robert Blackburn building all the way to the Computing Services store room at the back of “Applied Science 3″. No easy task and took around 2 hours. Next came the difficult bit. With all the monitors out of the way, FreeSide had a bit more space outside where the monitors were to put all the dead PCs, which at a last count came to about 35-40 PCs of varying size and remaining components.

So, now FreeSide is back to having enough space to fill up with donated computers for the next year or so. Also, while bored doing all that, I decided to have a look at the spectrum and the commodore that had been donated a while ago. The comodore works perfectly which was a suprise and the spectrum….well it outputs some video although its still borked.

Pictures to come later.