Something Unreal

I was recently with a friend who runs a server which is a lot more impressive than mine, so I thought I’d show it off. It also sounds like a jet engine.

[Watch in HD]

For a start, it’s actually in a rack-mount case (2U), with ~17TB total disk capacity and 20GB of RAM (it usually has about 24, but he had to remove some to use in another machine, hence the sticks of RAM lying on top of the case). It’s running a few VMs for people (with Arch Linux as the host), acting as a NAS, and doing a few other things like running some IRC bots, but he shut it down and rebooted it so that I could hear the fans rev up. =D

If you couldn’t access my site a few days ago, this is why! I was given the final push to give my old server a break for eternity and switch to a quieter, faster computer that’s in much better condition, and which used to be my main computer before I upgraded to a quad-core a couple of years ago.

[Watch in HD]

I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL I hate MySQL

…And on that note, my site is finally back up (including this blog)! Thank you for your patience, everybody. It’s now running on what used to be my main computer, before I moved to a quad-core. I’ll upload a video with some more information and showing a few dust bunnies in the old computer’s case. For the curious, here are some quick comparisons between the old and new servers:

Actually, I will need to take it down on 2 occasions within the next couple of days for about 15 minutes each, as I forgot to copy a handful of programs from the old HDD that are unrelated to this web  site but which are needed for other jobs that the server constantly does. So, if you can’t connect to this site within the next couple of days, wait a little while for me to finish fiddling around inside and booting it back up, and then please try again. =)

When the mouse is moved, the the Caps/Num/Scroll Lock LEDs on the keyboard come on. Then, while trying to prove that there is no program running in the background to control the LEDs, the PS/2 devices (keyboard, mouse) stop working entirely. Such are the strange things that my old server does. (Yes, that computer is what’s hosting my web site.)

[Watch at YouTube]

Please excuse the song sample that’s looping repetitively on StepMania in the background the whole time.

Once again, it’s time to comment on my server’s downtime after it’s already happened rather than give warning in advance that it is going to go down. *Sigh*

Well, we made it through another router (you probably noticed lots of patches of downtime over the last week as it was dying), so I had to set up a new one. Here’s to hoping that this one can make it through 2012!

For the past month or so, my site has been becoming insanely slow to browse around on. It seems the culprit is the WLAN card again, although I’m not 100% sure. However, rather than just replace that again and continue to use my 7-year-old server, I am going to retire Server-tan and use a “new” machine. She’s been through a lot (including many power cuts, which have damaged so many files that I’m amazed it still even works), and the fact that a hard-drive is still working, after 3 years of being on non-stop and having 1.5 years of normal use before that, impresses me. So, I’d like to take the opportunity, while it’s still in a working-but-slow state, to copy everything necessary and set up a new machine so that it can pick up where the old one left off, with minimal interruptions to my site/blog.

The “new” machine is actually going to be my previous workstation (with different drives and graphics card, to save power). That machine never died – I merely wanted to be able to run newer games that it was too slow for and so retired it and built a new one. It should be good to go if I just throw in a hard-drive and operating system. =D

When done, my site should be faster, more reliable (new hard-drive, UPS), and, for my own benefit, quieter. It sure is going to be weird at night after sleeping for 2 years with a stock CPU cooler humming away.

This will probably happen around the end of the month, when I should have enough money (there’s other stuff I want to get, too, such as a NAS for backups).

The reason for my server’s downtime today was another power cut lasting from around 9 AM to 6:40 PM (GMT), and there’s some unfortunate proof…

[Watch at YouTube]

Every power cut has messed things up a little more, and the one today seemed to be the final straw. It’s back up and running now, though (as you can see, if you’re reading this). =D

I’ve finally got around to updating WordPress, the software this blog of mine runs on! Sorry for the downtime that caused, and the fact that I overran, as usual…

While I was at it, I edited one of the themes to try to make it look similar to my YouTube channel‘s design (since I was having a hard time finding a theme I’d be happy with). Since I edited it myself, it might not work quite right yet on all browsers. Please feel free to tell me if you notice anything weird! I am still changing things on the theme.

Also, all old posts have thankfully been kept, but unfortunately, their categories have become a little messed-up. It will take me a little while to fix this by hand, so please bear with me. ^^;

Well, I know a few people recently noticed that my site (i.e. blog and downloads) was down. It had been down from the 23rd or 22nd of this month, until just a couple of minutes ago. This is because its hard drive’s master file table (the area responsible for storing the locations of all files on the drive) had become corrupted and Windows couldn’t even get to the desktop while booting without a bluescreen appearing (nor could the Windows recovery program run in DOS).

I’ve gone back to an old drive which I stopped using last year, but, extremely luckily, I was able to salvage the entire site and MySQL database (which is responsible for holding all posts on my blog) from the failing hard drive. Som theoretically, my site should now appear to be back to exactly how it was 4 days ago. If I hadn’t been able to do that then the most recent version I’d have would be a backup I made some time last year.

It will go down again very soon as I install all of the many updates to Windows, but hopefully this will only be temporary. After that, I’ll make a post, embedding HD videos which I recorded at London MCM last weekend, but until I make that post, you can have a look at the videos at my YouTube channel. There are more videos being uploaded as I type.

My router fried itself a couple of days ago, so no-one will have been able to access my server during that time.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s all okay now (and I actually have a better router, so it should stay okay).