For the first time in 5 years I flipped the ‘big switch’ on the DNS side from my home DSL connection over to a slicehost-hosted VPS (virtual private server). From my standpoint, everything will take exactly the same effort to manage from the software side, but the hardware concerns should be gone.

The past 5 years I’ve been wrestling with various ideas for how to get faster Internet service to my home so I could maintain my own hardware and have total flexibility over how I serve my pages to the world (mostly so I can just tinker around now and then). In the end, no good service materialized, and I couldn’t justify the prices it would take to upgrade to even a fraction of the bandwidth I’m getting right now.

I expect that support.supermegaultragroovy.com (where FogBugz lives) will be down another day or so, but I can get by manually monitoring my support mail until then. Other than that, everything else should be working as it was before. If you do notice anything behaving badly, please do let me know.

• While the manual and purchase page say you can only use two HDDs with the onboard SATA controller (despite picturing 4 SATA plugs), you can actually use four. I am currently running the stock 80GB SATA drive as my root/boot partition, and have my important data (databases/website/etc) split across a 250GB RAID1 array.
• This system is bloody loud when it’s powered on. It POSTs with its fans sounding like a jet engine, and quiets down to a freight train during normal operation. I measured it at 60dB SPL from about 2′ away. Don’t sit near this thing for too long, and definitely don’t try to entertain any fantasies of it sitting near your desk. I have it tucked away in the basement (and can still hear it through the heating ducts if the house is sufficiently quiet).
• The case is gigantic. I am just shocked at how deep this case is — 26.55″. You can measure it out and try to get a feel for it, but you just won’t appreciate this fact until you see it in person. This brings me to my next point…
• This server is very heavy. I was totally unaware of what I was getting myself into. My wife said the box was delivered by a very large guy who used a dolly and had to use a special pneumatic lift to get the server off his truck. The shipping weight is 125 lbs, and the tower itself is around 110 lbs. My back wasn’t very happy with me after I lugged this thing across my house and down to the basement all by myself.
• Buy whatever 667MHz FB-DIMMs you can get your hands on, and don’t worry about PC5300 vs PC5400. Everything I’ve read says that there’s really no difference other than testing (PC5400 is tested at a higher clock rate), and despite my ordering PC5400 Crucial RAM, it showed up with PC5300 markings on it in the end. I saved at least $100 by not relying purely on configuration tools that ask you what kind of hardware you’re buying for — clearly there are different price tags to be expected when you’re dealing with actual server hardware. The Mac fanatics should be used to this by now.
• The POST stage takes a very long time. I’m not used to waiting so long to get to the actual boot process. It definitely makes testing my boot scripts a real pain in the butt.
• It’s a lot of hardware for the money. Considering what I got for what I spent, I’m very happy with the purchase. There’s certainly room for upgrades in the future if I require it, and the case/PSU/fans are all top-notch — definitely beyond what I’d be capable of tracking down if I tried to build this myself.

If you are in the market for one of these bad-boys, and have some questions about it, definitely feel free to leave comments here or fire me an email.

After giving up on virtualization (really, there wasn’t much benefit for the sort of thing I’m doing) I decided to go the familiar route and install Ubuntu on the PowerEdge 1900 system. After practicing the migration to two other servers, I felt I was ready to finally flip the switch on the new setup.

Last night I completed the final leg of the switch by handing the task of PPPoE connection management and routing to the new system. Now all the services (www, svn, routing, ssh, etc) that would normally get served by piggy are all coming directly from animal.

The last stage of the migration will involve tracking down and mirroring all the data that isn’t overly obvious. Once that’s complete, I will probably blow piggy away, install Ubuntu, and try to maintain a hot backup of animal for any hardware emergencies that might occur. Of course, with this class of system, that shouldn’t be as much of a concern as with my $7 motherboard special.

I’m trying to reorganize the way I serve the site and clean up my server management tasks a little bit, and I’m planning a move to a Dell PowerEdge 1900 soon. I wish I could say I got an xserve, but they’re far too expensive — more than 2x what I paid for the PowerEdge 1900— and I’m not sure I could really deal with learning Mac OS X server on top of all the other stuff involved in the move.

Part of the idea was to move the server tasks off to a set of virtualized servers. This was something I could start doing while I wait for the new hardware to arrive, and all I would have to do is copy the server over to the physical machine once it’s up and running. This is a great idea, in theory, but so far this setup has taken the host server offline twice over the weekend.

Since I was using VMWare Server to achieve my goal, and my host hardware crapped out on me twice, I thought that it might be a good idea to take a look at xen as an alternative. In doing this, I made the fatal mistake of using debian’s apt-get to grab all the packages I needed (because some other things needed upgrading, I just did an apt-get upgrade). In doing this, debian thoughtfully upgraded my php install to php5.2, which FogBugz doesn’t support.

This is not the first time that debian bit me like this. I had some trouble earlier because I required python 2.4 for a web application project I was working on using TurboGears, and debian was stuck on 2.3 still. I vowed to switch distributions once I got some new hardware, and I have my sights set on ubuntu in the meantime.

So, to make a long story short, you can expect the site to be a little shaky for a bit as I move to new hardware. I hope to have things operating as they did before ASAP, and I don’t plan to do anything to disrupt the existing hardware until I get the new box.