Sunday, May 20, 2007

Marinanet is coming to Coffs Harbor

In the not so distant future, the beautiful Coffs Harbor marina will become the southern most Marinanet location. It will also be one of the first Marinas to use the new Hotspot system I developed.

This would probably be one of my favorite Marina locations - particularly the most scenic.

No specific installation date set but it is expected to be in the short term.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Attending to the web servers

Web servers are like the wilder beasts of the Internet. I imagine them to be out in the open grass plains happily grazing in the sun. I also can imagine tigers, cheetahs and other predators lurking around the fringes looking for the few that aren't paying attention or have been wounded and thus are falling behind the herd.

The predators are the numerous script kiddies (skiddies) and crackers out there that either trying it on, seeking to find yet another server to host their warez, or they're building a massive, high bandwidth botnet in which to strike down those who oppose them.

When I looked at my new herd of servers (okay, 3 isn't really a herd...) I saw a neglected bunch that needed some tender loving care. So all this week I have been looking at what makes them tick and for what purposes they serve. In the process I've been cutting the fat, optimizing and tightening things up. There's still a ways to go but things are already looking better, especially after upgrading the link from 10Mbit to 100. I hope whoever owned those domains I disabled doesn't get too pissed.

Things that need to happen:
  • Consolidate servers into a single rack and connect them via a private LAN
  • Adjust load balancing to go between all three servers
  • Establish a managed firewall
  • Upgrade OS and packages on each

I won't feel comfortable until all that is in place.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Amazing what a bit of tweaking does



The big long stretch is where the poor MySQL daemon just couldn't cope with the demand. So a few tweaks to how it caches etc later and you see the boost. DB Server load dropped from 45.0 down to 0.40 too.