FreeSide On The Web

Over the last couple of years,  FreeSide has grown substantially both in production machines as well as the amount of consumed space. Also, by adding and removing servers and terminals over that time, the network (and the room) has become a bit of a mess both physically and systems wise.

As such, Reboot!, the total FreeSide rebuild “event” will be taking place in the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, this will cause some major downtime over the space of a few days (probably a weekend), while we rebuild each server system and tweak server hardware to be more efficient, add new (and some improved) services and sort the general infrastructure of the room using the new server/network racks.

Anybody who is part of FreeSide is welcome to help out (http://www.freeside.co.uk/content/join), however, keep in mind that there is limited space in the room as it is, let alone with  lot of people shifting things around, so if you would like to help out, pass us an email to admins[-at-]freeside.co.uk to say, and we will see what can be arranged.

The day should be quite fun, but there is a lot of work to be done. This will be good experience for anybody who enjoys (or has an interest in) Linux servers, network infrastructureand generally how things fit together.

See http://wiki.freeside.co.uk/index.php/Reboot!_2008 for more information on what specific changes we will be making to FreeSide.

 Reboot! is now taking place this weekend (weekend starting 11th April), we will be meeting in the Sun Cafe down Cottingham Road at 10am, have a coffee and head in to get started.

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.