radmon.org testing new server!

Juzzie wrote:

no real difference in speed here (southofhobart), though I get errors like "no data in response" when I try to load a page..?...only sometimes...but if I reload the page there is no problem.
also, currently, there are big holes in my current data, which is unfortunate because there is some spikey stuff going on here at the moment. Is it possible for you (dan) to store sent data while you are doig "dev", then to apply it to the appropriate station chart later, when things are working again?

Ok, let me know if the 'No data' error keeps happening. Unfortunately, if the server is down then it is not registering data and so it is lost, unless you're using RadLog in which case there are several logs kept of data on your local computer. Luckily most 'dev' operations can be done live without any major effect, unless I screw it up.

Well the server stayed up overnight without being affected by router DHCP problems that hid it from the world the night before. The next test is to see if it stays alive for a week.

In the meantime there are some things left to fix:
- email server
- sftp server uploading to the right folders
- backup from system drive to three other disks I started to use software RAID, but this turned out to be more trouble to recover from failure than a standard setup, e.g. higher risk of non-bootable system, not straightforward to rebuild the array after failure. It caused a lot of swearing during setup. So simple type backup system using cron jobs instead.
- swap out loud fan grapiics card, or find a way to spin the fan down - nvidida
- update station detailed graphs to automatically updating

Thank you to those who have donated during the hosting worries, your donations will be put towards putting together a rack server At the moment the server is my old PC from 12 years ago - an Athlon XP2500+ single core machine with 2.5Gb RAM!! With 15% load average and 200Mb RAM usage this puts into perspective the power needed to run radmon.org. i.e. at current traffic levels not very much at all. Very annoyed at the hosts for worrying me so much about the amount of hosting required for radmon.org. I am interested to see how it would cope serving a lot of pages..

Quick outage/reboot this afternoon, had to install a slim lxde install to control the graphics card fan. To test the X server came up properly on cold boot I had to reboot. Also have implemented a crontab rsync for regular backups, this will happen every day at 4am UK time. As rsync only writes changed files, the backup completes within a few minutes so should not impact server response in any significant way.

Next task: Sort email and sftp servers

Backup procedure has been improved so that 4 disks contain radmon system and user data. One copy should be kept in an independent location, so can anyone spare some space on a server for it? Thimo - perhaps your home server?

Server might be a bit slow this morning, I forgot to initialise the backups manually last night and several first time backups separated by 30mins started overnight. Lots of HD activity and mem usage discovered this morning, 5hrs after they started. I will allow it to run to see if it will complete, if its not done by the afternoon I will have to cancel and check the backup command.