The MacDeskBlog

I am cutting over to the new server. Changes to site preferences made on the old server after this point will be lost.

UPDATE: I encountered a small problem during the migration. I need to change a bit of code in the site for it to work at DreamHost. So, the migration is postponed until I get that straightened out.

I followed my friend John Engler’s advice, albeit almost a year later, and signed up with DreamHost. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to stick with them. Here’s what I’m weighing …

Pros:
• Designated MySQL server
• One-Click installations of WordPress and phpBB, which I already use, and a couple of other products which I may start to use
• Transparency about downtimes and service impacts
• High disk and bandwidth quotas for a low price
• Pretty quick responses from support

Cons:
• Doesn’t support MySQL database replication
• Doesn’t support DNS slave setup, and some non-configurable entries in DNS management interface are incorrect, so their DNS is unusable for me
• Downtimes and service impacts appear to be fairly common
• Linux
• Pretty inflexible responses from support

Unknowns:
• Performance under load
• Database performance
• Implementation effort required to replicate MySQL via scripting

So, that’s where I am right now. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them here on the blog.

The site was down from about 3am PST to about 10am PST on Monday. A warehouse about two blocks away was destroyed by fire, and the power lines which feed us run right in front of the building. Fortunately, no one was injured nor killed.

The network hosting the primary server went down on August 28th, seven days before my wedding. I thought it would get fixed within a day (since it affects the company which actually hosted the server too), but that proved false. We are back on the DSL line until I find time to set up a new hosted server.

Fortunately, the image server hosted by importGSM is still chugging along happily, so only the pages are constrained by the DSL bandwidth. My apologies for the downtime and any interim performance issues.

Well, I finally figured out why no one who registered on the blog since the migration to the new server ever submitted a comment. I just fixed it and reset and resent passwords to existing users. Sorry it took this long for me to realize I had a configuration error.

Eight years ago today, the Macintosh Desktop Picture Archive was born with a dozen pictures available in up to five sizes each. Several hundred people visited the site each day, which prompted me to start generating and posting two new pictures weekly. I picked up the MacDesktops.com domain several months later.

I had just recently picked up a magnificently huge 17″ display, and couldn’t find any desktop pictures which looked good on the monstrously large 1280×1024 screen. Things have changed a bit in the past eight years. I’m not quite sure, but I think that I was running a PowerMac 6100/60 back then, powering Photoshop 3.0. I had a wicked fast 128K ISDN line, which really sped posting of pictures.

These days, my screen has shrunk to 15.2″ physically and to 1280×854 logically. My processor has sped up from a 60MHz PowerPC 601 to a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4, running Photoshop 7.0 (I haven’t upgraded in a while). And MacDesktops has grown to 4877 pictures (and counting) in 15 sizes (not counting the portrait sizes which I no longer generate), consuming 23GB of disk space which are accessed by about 15 thousand unique visitors each day.

Some of you noticed that the site had some problems with the image server last night. This issue has been resolved for the time being, and additional changes may be in the works at ImportGSM.

I redirected image serving to the main web server for a few hours, which seemed to have a modest impact on site performance. The only significant error appeared to be that the server was missing at least one picture set.

I’d like to set up some load balancing/fail-over for the image server, but I’ve never done anything like that before. If you have any experience with setting that up on a very low budget, please let me know. Links to software or hardware solutions, php/perl solutions, or your experiences would be appreciated.

I’m sorry for 12-24 hour downtime Thursday night/Friday. Someone set up a new server using the same IP address, which triggered some serious problems. Then, to make matters worse, I had an obscure misconfiguration in the server which took me about 10 hours to identify. Ultimately, I had to switch an ‘off’ to ‘on’ in a Mac OS X Server specific configuration file (”/etc/mysqlManager.plist”) which I didn’t know about. You learn something new every day. And twice as much when something blows up in your face.

Fundamentally, I didn’t test the server thoroughly enough before I put it into production. I should have uncovered this problem then. Oh well.

A special thanks goes to Eric Swinson of Visual Seed who is recovering from surgery yet still managed to mobilize resources to identify and resolve the IP conflict. Eric provides the Mac mini which hosts the site. The image server didn’t have any problems, and for that I also thankful to Eric at Import GSM.

Again, my apologies for the downtime. I hope not to repeat that for quite some time.

I just updated DNS to cutover the web server to the new server. If that goes smoothly, then I’ll cutover the database too.

Soon after that, I will switch the announcement lists over to MailMan server distribution lists. What this means for you is that if you are currently on one of the announcement lists, you will receive an invitation to join the new replacement email list. If you do nothing, you will be removed from the list. I think that bears repeating. If you do not respond to the list invitation, you will not receive any announcements after cutover to the new lists. I added a note to the bottom of the current announcements. Next weekend, when I cutover, I will send one last message to the old lists with instructions on how to subscribe to the new lists.

Switching back to the new server, I have received no comments about the new server. Historically, some of you have sent in positive or negative about server changes. I’m not quite sure how to interpret the current silence. You might be tempted to think that I’m exaggerating about no comments; that I really mean I have received few comments. Even I am surprised to say that by no comments, I mean zero. In fact, mail in general has been pretty light over the past few weeks. I hope it’s not disappearing or something. Submissions dropped off for a while too. Happily, they appear to be picking up again.

Changes in the works:
1. move database writes and ad reads to new server - this weekend
2. transition mail lists to MailMan - next weekend
3. update WordPress for weblog - Presidents’ Day weekend
4. move into new house - weekend of the 24th
5. resurrect the statistics server - March
6. major site changes - March/April

UPDATE: The database cutover is complete. WordPress is a bit screwed up on the administration side. I may need some downtime to fix it.

This has taken me at least a month longer than I had hoped, but I’m finally ready to start beta testing the new main server. The new server is a Mac Mini provided by the folks at Visual Seed. Expect to see new ads from them soon. Images are still and will continue to be hosted by the good folks at Import GSM.

I’m heading off on vacation for the next week, or I would try to swap the new server into production. Of course, that would be somewhat foolish without more testing, so it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t get to this point two days ago.

Known issues on the new server:
1. ads may not always appear on the pages,
2. changing your site preferences might fail with a Couldn’t Connect to Database error,
3. site might be a little bit sluggish when fetching ads,
4. all blog related links will take you back to http://MacDesktops.com/ instead of leaving you on http://ws2.macdesktops.com/

Why those issues aren’t problems:
1. ad requests go through an ssh tunnel to the production database, which will reside on the new server.
2. database writes have the same limitation.
3. same thing.
4. limitation in WordPress. Won’t be an issue when ws1 becomes MacDesktops.com.

Please take a stroll through the new server. If it works well for you, feel free to use it instead of the production server. And if you encounter any other problems or odd behavior on the new server, please send me a note and head back to the production server. As always, you can reach me at the feedback address at macdesktops.com, even if the javascript mailto link doesn’t work.