Announcement: New server coming online (estimated 2017-08-11)

[Madpoo]

Hi everyone...

Primenet has a replacement server coming online in about 1 week, tentatively planned for Friday, August 11, 2017.

The new server is actually up and running concurrently with the existing server, so we've been doing testing on it and doing practice runs of syncing up the web and data.

The new system has more memory, more CPU cores, and more drive space available. We really haven't been stressed on any of those except a few times when CPU gets busy (usually when I'm running a complicated query), but the extra headroom we're getting should take us well into the next few years.

We're also moving from the current physical location in Seattle to a colocation in Dallas. Same hosting company, but their Dallas facility has more on-site capabilities for doing basic things like swapping bad drives, etc.

Right now, the DNS entries for the web services have been lowed to a time-to-live of 30 minutes in preparation for the move. They had been set to 7 days, so really the estimated date of the switch might have been sooner but I want to wait for any potential DNS caches to pick up the shorter TTL.

When the switch happens I'll make updated announcements here, and the dry-runs I've done show we'll probably have 18-20 minutes of downtime while we sync things up.

I'll try to work up a web page on the old server that says something to the effect of "if you're seeing this, refresh your DNS lookup to point to the new server" or something like that, and all automated hits from the Prime95 clients will simply time and retry later when they finally refresh and hit the new IP address.

We went through this before back in 2014 when we upgraded servers then and it went pretty smooth... this time should be even smoother because I just cloned the virtual machine entirely as a baseline... much easier than the last time when I was starting from scratch.

[GP2]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Hi everyone...

Primenet has a replacement server coming online in about 1 week, tentatively planned for Friday, August 11, 2017.

The new server is actually up and running concurrently with the existing server, so we've been doing testing on it and doing practice runs of syncing up the web and data.

This would be a great opportunity to finally convert the "User name" field to Unicode (as UTF-8 or nvarchar or whatever).

Actually, the "Computer name" field also should be converted to nvarchar because in a few cases people used accented characters there as well.

Here's an old thread which discussed that topic.

I have a data file with conversions from garbled names to correct names (first mentioned in this old post and updated since then), which is current as of August 1.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

August 11, 2017.

Now, if you delay with exactly one week, for whatever obscure reasons, then I will have triple reason to say "happy birthday server"...

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by GP2

This would be a great opportunity to finally convert the "User name" field to Unicode (as UTF-8 or nvarchar or whatever).

Actually, the "Computer name" field also should be converted to nvarchar because in a few cases people used accented characters there as well.

Here's an old thread which discussed that topic.

I have a data file with conversions from garbled names to correct names (first mentioned in this old post and updated since then), which is current as of August 1.

That's something we can always tackle later. For purposes of migrating from one physical host to another though, I'm keeping things simple to avoid having to troubleshoot other things.

Maybe once the migration is done and I've picked up the old server, I can use that as a test bed for making more radical changes. Or, the new physical server even has room for an additional virtual machine that could serve the same purpose.

[GP2]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

That's something we can always tackle later. For purposes of migrating from one physical host to another though, I'm keeping things simple to avoid having to troubleshoot other things.

Except you're currently syncing up the old server and the new server, and checking that the data is the same on both.

So if the new database uses nvarchar for "User name" and "Computer name" and the old one uses varchar, you can verify that the nvarchar modification doesn't break anything. It seems like an opportunity that shouldn't go to waste.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by GP2

Except you're currently syncing up the old server and the new server, and checking that the data is the same on both.

So if the new database uses nvarchar for "User name" and "Computer name" and the old one uses varchar, you can verify that the nvarchar modification doesn't break anything. It seems like an opportunity that shouldn't go to waste.

For the new server, I'm doing a DB backup/restore just before we go live (and a few times during testing), so I really can't monkey with the schema on the new system.

[GP2]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

For the new server, I'm doing a DB backup/restore just before we go live (and a few times during testing), so I really can't monkey with the schema on the new system.

Will the old server be taken offline immediately?

Once you've cut over to the new server, you could briefly run a few experiments on the old server before retiring it. Change things there and see if anything breaks.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by GP2

Once you've cut over to the new server, you could briefly run a few experiments on the old server before retiring it. Change things there and see if anything breaks.

Since this is in a virtual machine, it would be trivial to run "what if" experiments. Not necessarily on the original server.

Hmmm... That didn't work. [Quick rewind] Oh, that worked better....

[Madpoo]

I'm still planning on doing the migration tonight (it's only 9 PM on Friday, my timezone).

I'm just waiting until late in the US and when it's the wee hours in Europe when the largest percentage of visitors are less likely to be visiting the site.

As mentioned, the DNS change should kick in after about 30 minutes, and meanwhile it only takes me about 15-20 minutes to do a fresh backup/restore of the web/data.

At this point I think I might go for it around 10 PM Pacific (5 AM UTC), or in roughly an hour from now.

[Madpoo]

The new server should be online and available to all.

I took a little longer to open up the firewall to allow me to do some testing of everything beforehand, but everything checked out okay and I see people hitting the server okay, checking in results, etc.

I'll continue to keep my eye on it for the next hour or so, make sure all is well and just make sure the initial shakedown goes okay.

[monst]

What's up with M41468027?
One of my machines just submitted results for M41468027.

From this... https://www.mersenne.org/report_expo...exp_hi=&full=1

My "Result" matches the masked result submitted in May, 2008. However the "Residue" reported at that time is different. When I resubmitted the result, the server returned an error that the residue cannot be 0.

Let me know if you what me to give you the unmasked result from my run. Thanks.

-- Rich