New Server News

[JG]

I am in the process of building a new web server for Sogna Digital Museum.  The current server runs Windows Server 2003, which is going out of support from Microsoft, plus the hardware is 7 or 8 years old (disregarding a new hard drive along the way.)  And since newer Windows Server versions require certified server-grade hardware, I can't upgrade my desktop workstation and retire the old hardware to server duty like I have in the past.  I've got to buy new server-grade hardware to keep this site going.

The new server will be a Xeon E3 3.1 Ghz with 8GB of RAM running Windows 2012 R2.  It'll also sport dual RAIDed 250GB SSDs now that this technology has surpassed traditional spinning platter hard drives. Also, using non-RAID storage has always been a risk of the current server, and that's being rectified.  The total cost is running me about $1200.  Thats alot but being brand new hardware I expect it to easily last 7 or 8 years, which means it'll effectively cost $12-$15 a month.

You can help offset the cost by buying something in the For Sale area of the main site.  Mention the new server build and I'll give you 5% off anything that isn't already discounted. (Offer valid until the new server replaces the old.)


All the hardware has arrived except the motherboard.  That's a bummer as I had hoped to do the hardware installation this weekend.

[JG]

Motherboard arrived today and I've completed hardware installation this evening.  Haven't turned it on yet though.  I'll do that and make sure all the lights and BIOS settings are working fine tomorrow.

In the photo you can see how this build turned out.

• Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C224.  I've historically been loyal to the ASUS brand as I've never had one of their motherboards short out or otherwise stop working, with most of them going 50000- or 60000-plus hours without failure before retirement.  But the Asus server-rated LGA1150 board has a 222 chipset, not 224 or 226, which means its older and has two fewer USB3 ports.  If they've produced a newer board it wasn't for sale on Newegg.  Asus is a close partner of AMD, so perhaps they just don't invest much in their Intel boards anymore or focus more on the higher-end Xeon boards.  An AMD Opteron configuration was much more expensive than a Xeon E3 config, so I went Intel, which is another deviation from my norm.
• Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3 (not that you can see it under the heatsink).  This is currently the cheapest server-grade CPU type, discounting used or out of production models.  Basically the server version of the i3 chip for desktops and laptops.  Not as powerful as the i5 or i7 equivalents (which only come in much more expensive socket-chipset configurations), but for a web server it's ideal.  This is the 80W 3.1Ghz quad-core model based on 22nm Haswell architecture so it has decent speed but lower power requirements than normal so it'll be cheaper to operate.  I like the radial fin heatsink design Intel has, but the fan cabling is terrible.  I had to tape the wires together and then tape them to the sides of the heat sink to ensure they wouldn't migrate into the fan's domain.
• Memory: 2 x 4GB Kingston DDR3 1600 with ECC. I am happy with either Kingston or Crucial brands.  I am a little concerned how close one of the sticks sits to the CPU heatsink though.  Could be alot of waste heat blasting onto this stick.  I was considering some memory heat sinks (which came preinstalled on the last set of Kingston sticks I bought) but these only have chips on one side so I'm not how well the heatsinks would fit or whether the heatsinks would cause a problem attached to bare PCB instead of chips.  Plus its ECC so it should self-correct if it runs hot.  I can always add heatsinks in the future if we have stability problems.
• Hard drives: 2 x Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SATA3 solid state drives. These are mounted vertically at the bottom center of the case (not where I expected them to be in the case but it'll do).  The EVO series is less speedy than the PRO series, but should be sufficient for web server usage.
• Power supply: Enermax Revolution X't 430W.  Enermax hasn't let me down yet, plus this is one of the few PSUs out there with 24+8 motherboard power cables.  The motherboard can take 20 and 4 pin versions, but is happiest with 24 and 8 pins.  Plus its a 80Plus gold rated unit so its super efficient and keeps running its fan for 60 seconds after power shutdown to flush remaining heat.  430 is the lowest wattage model in this series but as you can see I don't have any expansion cards so 430W is more than enough. It was also on sale with an added rebate, making it cheaper than the 80Plus Bronze models I was considering.
• Case: Antec Three Hundred Two. I like Antec cases as they have really good airflow, lots of vents, and multiple fan mounting options like on the case sides (not that I use them much).  And they aren't butt-ugly like most manufacturer's cases who are trying to wow everyone with odd angles, transparent windows, handles, or other junk.  This model was on sale, also with a rebate, and has a huge top mounted fan, which is a big plus for my environment (a small closet)

There's also an unremarkable Samsung DVD burner in there.  Not that I need burning capabilities but they just don't make read-only models anymore anymore since the write technology is hardly any extra cost. I considered leaving out a permanent optical drive altogther, as I should only really need it for OS installation, but I reckoned it was worth $13 to not need to disassemble the drive from my workstation for this purpose.

You might also notice I'm a neat freak when it comes to my cable management and I like to have cables and cords running along the edges of the case or sufficiently out of the way to avoid interferring with fan airflow. And I especially dislike having anything dangling where they can get caught in a fan's blades if they come loose, so I tape things up and use cable and twist ties to restrict range of movement.  The 24 pin motherboard connector cable isn't quite long enough to run along the edge so it crosses the motherboard in the photo.  It'll actually sit much closer to the case edge than the motherboard though so it doesn't restrict the power supply's airflow as much as it might appear from the photo.  I ran the SATA and front panel connectors through the unused hard drive mounting rack so they'll stay out of the way for now, but I might need to rework this if I need to add a front fan (or two) for heat management.  Since there's no audio on this motherboard the cable for the front panel audio jacks hangs freely.

[JG]

Delay.

One of my workstation's drives failed last week.  No data loss becuase I had the drives mirror RAIDed (I can't recommend this enough if you do your own builds).  But I had to buy a pair of new drives and clone my data.  Went SSD this time although 1TB SSDs are pricey (about $700 for a pair).  I do gain 400 more GB out of it though.  I'd been living in the 10-40GB remaining realm for about a year so this is quite a relief.

Benefit to server is that I can move the working 600GB spinning platter drive to the new server.  Maybe both if the failed drive is repairable with a reformat.  May use this space for Sogna CD/DVD ISO image storage - making them available to download for poor souls like Saika who'd lost them.

[JG]

After much tweaking I finally got PHP working on the new server so I can start trying to shift things over to the new server.

Moving the static content over is trivial, but I'm not sure what other configurations may be needed. I may have to recompile some .NET modules and I know I have to change the SMF forum settings file but there may be something else.

The big unknown is how to get the MySQL database files for the forum moved over.  I am very much hoping that I can just copy and paste the files but they are different MySQL engine versions and I'm not sure this will work.  Websites all say you can definately move the files, but don't say much on whether theres a versioning problem to overcome.

The plan is to do a trial run to see what works and doesn't (hopefully tomorrow afternoon), and then do the full transition a day or two later.  A second trial will be done if the first goes badly (especially in regards to the MySQL files)


Note that I will have to lock the forum for writing during the trial(s) and transition.

[JG]

Work today went so well that I've gone ahead and flipped all the switches to cutover to the new server hardware.

I'm not entirely sure everything is working smoothly but 99% of it is and I'll take that for now. Members may private message me if they run into some feature that isn't working.

[JG]

Forum codebase updated from 2.0.4 to 2.0.6.

I'll get it up to 2.0.10 over the next week or so, but I want to step it up incrementally in case anything breaks, especially things I can't easily test (like registration).  2.0.5 was small I've jumped up two versions this time but I'll go up one version only every few days until we're up to 2.0.10.


Once I'm past 2.0.7 I can look into upgrading PHP on the server and tweaking some more functions to stop all the avatar images breaking.  Don't know if you guys are seeing it but I get about half the avatar images failing to load. Unsure if its a PHP versioning thing or I need to assign more memory to PHP so the image PHP scripts don't bomb.

[JG]

Problems with broken avatar images should now be resolved.

Ultimately, this required an update to the SMF attachments table.  It seems that alot of the older attachments did not have mime type assigned in the table.  Thats an easy thing to add given the filename extension.  When it didn't have a mime type, new server was returning it as application/octet-stream.  Sometimes the browser would render it inline, sometimes it wouldn't (and thus, broken image icon in browser window).  Old server apparently did some extra legwork and figured out the proper mime type of the file and returned image/gif, image/jpeg, etc. as needed on-the-fly.

May yet need to hack Display.php Download() function if new avatar images being added end up with a blank mime type value set in the database as well.  Won't know until you folks start adding new avatars.

[Moge]

Previously i had avatar transparencies being borked (and some that did work). Guess i'll test it again.

[JG]

Shouldn't be a problem for avatars.  Any normal-sized transparent GIF or PNG should remain so, as there's no rescaling on those avatar images.  It rescales large images though. For avtars I think the limit to prevent rescaling is 200x200. I think attachment images get thumbnailed regardless of size.  If it rescales your avatar, there's little I can do to protect transparency, unless you find info on the internet telling me what to do to SMF or PHP on IIS to fix it. *

If you can play around and test things, that would help alot.  Now that I've got the avatar thing fixed my focus is applying updates to take us to 2.07, 2.0.08, 2.0.9, and eventually 2.0.10.  Since I'm not yet to 2.0.7 I can't upgrade PHP on the server to latest version, which could automatically fix transparency issues.  You may simply want to wait until we're fully upgraded before playing with avatars and transparency.


* There is an option I could possibly apply.  I could write a .NET program to perform more exact resizing of any rescaled images, but it would be something that ran once a day.  So newly uploaded avatars may be opaque but within a day they would become transparent.

[JG]

Forum codebase has been updated to 2.0.7 but its broken TinyPortal. So everyone's being dumped into the board index page instead of the home page.

I've been working on the upgrade and temporary fix to get the forum back to usability but I need to take a break.  Will be back to fix TinyPortal in a few hours.

[Arizona]

Oh wow. I'm so used to the shout page, seeing the forum directly again, I did not realize how many boards this place has.

[JG]

Ok, I hope everything is done now.
Something got really messed up lastnight. Unsure if it was part of the TinyPortal code, or something I had messsed up applying the 2.0.7 update.  since I couldn't figure out what happened I set up a second forum with the 2.0.11 codebase, reapplied our mods (spoiler, youtube, etc.), and then applied TinyPortal 1.1.

So the good news is that we have the ShoutBox and forum homepage back.  Bad new is we jumped so many levels, I'm unsure if anything is broken.  Then again, its a fresh load of 2.0.11 so there shouldn't be anything wrong. We'll just have to monitor it for a few days.

[Arizona]

I can't seem to find the place to post my ever enlightening blather into the ShoutBox, in either IE or Firefox.

[JG]

Really? No textbox or button? Or do you see one but not the other? You can attach an image if it helps explain what you do see.

I didn't change security on anything.  Is anyone else able to confirm inability to post to the ShoutBox?

Its possible that browser cache may need to be cleared.  Board codebase 2.0.11 and Tiny Portal 1.1 would have new CSS, new JS, etc. that perhaps isn't coming down to your PC.  Pressing Ctrl+F5 to reload the page from server might resolve this, but seems odd that this would affect two browsers.

Its also possible that the ShoutBox doesn't work with the Core theme.  Using Default theme may work better.

[Arizona]

This is what I get. Usually the text entry field and button was there. I don't see it anywhere else either.

I'll try a different theme as soon as my dumb head figures out where I would change that. <_<

[JG]

Is it better now?

New TinyPortal added a new permission named tp_can_shout.  I've now added that permission to Regular Members role.

[Moge]

gif avatars and transparencies ain't working

[JG]

Were you uploading a file bigger than 150 pixels in either dimension?  That would cause it to resize and board was set to use JPEG for resized avatars.  I've changed it to PNG which should allow transparency to be retained.

If you want animated GIF then original must be no greater than 150 pixels in either dimension to avoid a resize, which will destroy all but the first frame.  That's no different than how the old server worked.

[Moge]

I was going by the limit of 200 pixels. So it was 150 pixels all along? Might try an APNG avatar to see if i can get pass the limit.

[uphillbattle]

i think I'm overdue for a new avatar