It's been a long time coming, but we're almost at the end of the ill-fated UWCS migration! After the target machine we were planning to move to developed power supply problems (as well as a worrying amount of bad configuration decisions), we finally gave up and started again. In hindsight, it was a godsend that we had a machine to do what would eventually become a test run on. It served as a stark reminder that we had underestimated the complexity of what we set out to do, and that we didn't know what we were doing. This lead to lots of quirks that weren't quite right, and meant that the communications we send out to users was patchy, confusing, and sometimes downright wrong.
This second attempt allowed us to select more reliable hardware (as opposed to, I shit you not, some server we got cheap second hand and untested) and move away from software raid, which turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. We now have a RAID 1 configuration in hardware, with an additional two hot swap disks. We went with an OS with long term support, and postponed the load balancing plans I mentioned in a previous post. That said, we've set things up in a way that means we can transition to a load balanced setup in the future.
Configuring things for the second time was a lot smoother, and now I've learnt more than I probably ever need to about managing IRC, Apache, and MySQL. Our interactions with the user base were a lot more professional, and it feels like we've actually helped people to navigate the switch over, instead of just letting them know and hoping for the best. We're currently in the grace period before turning off the old server for good, which gives us some time to check that everything is working properly (and fix the things that aren't without being in panic mode). Hopefully we've built the infrastructure that will carry us through the next decade, as the last server has taken us through the previous ten.
