Server Move

[Xepher]

UPDATE UPDATE: FRAK! Well, that didn't go so well, did it? Long story short, we moved 2 more times in the past 24 hours. I think we're settled down finally. I've been up 30 hours right now, and I'll make a new post later tonight or maybe tomorrow that'll be LONG and explain everything that happened.

UPDATE: Move is complete. So far, bumpy ride, and there've been some issues and brief outages. I'm tuning things to try and make it work better on the new system. Please let me know if/when you run into problems.

Fasten your seatbelts, we're about to move to a new server. Xepher.net has been hosted on a discounted plan I got through my old employer, and now that discount is going away. As such, I'm going to have to find a new home for everything. Thankfully things are all virtual these days, so it should be just a matter of finding a new host and transferring the data. I expect it to be mostly seamless, with a few interruptions in service here and there, maybe a couple hours downtime at most. There's always the chance things could go south though, so I'm giving as much notice as I can here. I just found out a few hours ago myself. Worst case though, I do have full, nightly backups of everything on my own PC here though, so no matter what happens, all the data is safe, and I will get it all back up and working sooner rather than later.

The good news about still being unemployed though, is that I have plenty of free time to work on this. :-) The move may happen as soon as tomorrow, so by the time some of you read this, it might already be past tense. In any case, keep an eye on this thread for updates, and if xepher.net is unreachable, feel free to ping me for status updates on AIM/Gtalk/YahooIM... my screenname is Xepher42.

[Xepher]

Oh, and if anyone has suggestions for a good VPS host that supports gentoo, lemme know. I'm currently considering Burst, Hostlatch, and Delimiter. All of them are rather on the cheap side, but it looks like I may actually get MORE bandwidth/storage for less money than even my super-cheap discount does now. This could be a good thing overall.

[Databits]

I hear great things about Linode, IF you can get hosting through them...

But outside that, AVOID Tektonic.  They overload their servers.

[Xepher]

I've decided to go with VPSVillage. They offer actual 4GB Xen instances at a price about what I was paying for colo on the arclight server a year ago... $160. That's about $100 more than I've been paying this past year, but I figure better to give money to some actual geeks doing quality work, than half-cocked, outsourced budget hosting. As for the actual hosting, well, it seems to offer nearly everything that linode does, up to and including letting you run your own custom kernels and OS images, but for a cheaper price. Anyway, I've placed my order, and they say "up to 3 days for setup" but I hope it'll be quicker than that. Tentatively, I'm aiming to do migration late at night in the next few days. Should be done by monday at the latest. I'll post more updates when I have an exact time.

[Xepher]

Okay, move is going to happen in about 2 hours or so. There will be some interruption in service, since I need to halt everything while I do a final sync to the new machine.

Also, this is a secondary host I'm moving to. The initial choice I made... well, I put in an order, and 36 hours (and 2 emails) later, I still haven't heard a word from them, so I went with another, cheaper option, who was MUCH more responsive. We'll see how this works out. Please give me until 10AM CST, after that, if there are any problems, let me know. I'm real curious to see how the performance on this new system is.

[Xepher]

Alright, move is complete. If you're reading this, it's on the new server.

One small problem so far... clock on this node is 12 hours fast. As it's a VM, I can't change it, so I've put in a ticket. Until they correct it though, times (such as on the forum) are going to be off a bit. Shouldn't really impact much though.


If you run into any other problems, or have connection issues, let me know. I don't really know how solid this new service is going to be, so report any issues to me so I can have a better overview of the quality.

[Databits]

Why not just set the boxes timezone?  I'm unsure why you wouldn't be able to change it on your VM, as I can change it on each of my VM's just fine, and as long as you have it keep the time up to date you're all good.

[Xepher]

As for why I can't set the time... it's OpenVZ (not Xen) which shares a kernel across instances. The clock is not virtualized, so changing the kernel clock changes it for all VMs on the node... not something you want a customer being able to do, and so CAP_SYS_TIME is off by default in VMs.

Faking the timezone isn't good either, because everything automatically adjusts based on the timezone. For example, the forums here display all times/dates converted to whatever timezone the user sets in their profile. If I set the system timezone to Australia, it's then going to convert BACK to a US zone, and it'll still be off by 12 hours (and 2 minutes, 51 seconds.) Though yes, I could probably hack it by setting the system to think the clock is in localtime on the "hardware" clock, and making a custom timezone file that's offset by 12 hours, 3 minutes... but really, they should just run NTP on the node/host anyway, since every client is gonna have the same problem. I'm just waiting for the support ticket I raised to get attention, then it should get fixed properly.

[Xepher]

Just realized the localtime hack above wouldn't work either, since it's only for initial boot. No worries though, since they synced the host clock now.

[Xepher]

Okay, rough ride so far. Server ran out of memory a bit ago, made a lot of things act wonky, including DNS. Some sites may have cached bad DNS results, but that should expire in an hour or so. I'm tuning things to try and use less memory, since this server has no swap. Let me know if you come across any other issues.

[Xepher]

Ugh... See updated post at top.