Downtime - September 25, 2020

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
On the evening of September 25, 2020 we will be offline for a period of time as we migrate to new servers. The outage is expected to start around 10 pm Pacific Time and I expect the forums to be up and running before 10 am the morning of September 26, 2020. This is the second part of my planned updates for the forums for the last half of 2020 and it is now possible since we have migrated to a more modern forum software.

After having run the servers off of my own hardware at a data centre for the past 20+ years, it is a little sad to move of our own infrastructure, but it makes the most sense. The current servers are at the end of their life cycle so before we encounter any issues with them, is the perfect time to migrate away. Most important I will now be able to cut some costs without affecting service. That should help keep the future stability of the forums intact.

While we have had enterprise grade servers for the past 12 years, thanks to the support of the TDIClub membership, that wasn't always the case as you can see from some of the original posts almost 20 years ago :):

During the outage you should just get a message that the forums are offline and you will not be able to search.
 
Last edited:

pkhoury

That guy with the goats
Joined
Nov 30, 2010
Location
Medina, TX
TDI
2013 JSW, 2003 Jetta Ute, 2 x 2002 Golf, 2000 Golf
Wow - SCSI hard drives with a 3.9ms access time. Lemme guess - that DOA hard drive (in the first archived/quoted post) - was it a Seagate or an IBM Ultradeathstar? At least you used Debian - also my Linux distro of choice (though I've always been a Solaris guy myself).

I sympathize with upgrades - I recently decommissioned one of my servers and moved from 12 x 3.5" 1TB seagate constellation drives to 25 x 2.5" 900GB SAS drives. I also upgraded another array to RAID 6, and no joke, a few days after I backed everything up, 1 drive in my RAID 5 array took a dump. Gotta love the timing of upgrades sometime.

Out of curiosity, what kind of enterprise hardware was used before? I'm guessing either Dell or Proliant, since that's what the status quo use?

Thanks for all you've done for us btw and keep up the good work!
 

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
Yes, it was a Seagate, drive that died before.

The current (well almost former) servers indeed Dells. R410 and R420. They served me well and and probably could have run for several more years, but with older hardware the risk of a longer outage is just too high. These days there are more options then when this all first started.

For better or for worse, issues like you indicated with the driving taking a dump are now someone else's problem to reslove! ;) All I can do now is submit a ticket!
 

pkhoury

That guy with the goats
Joined
Nov 30, 2010
Location
Medina, TX
TDI
2013 JSW, 2003 Jetta Ute, 2 x 2002 Golf, 2000 Golf
Damn I'm good! Yeah, Seagate hard drives are truly hit or miss. Back in the 90s, there were some really fast 7200RPM drives, but I feel like Seagate SCSI drives like to die for no reason unexpectedly.

And yeah, hosted machines nowadays are pretty crazy - lots of virtualization, but the hardware being as fast as it is, the end user wouldn't notice the difference. And I've found a lot of hosting companies use SSDs, too. Those are still far out of my reach, and like you said, I'd rather someone else deal with it, take the depreciation, and if there's a problem, submit a trouble ticket.
 

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
Well, it is now done. As of Friday, October 30, 2020 the dedicated TDIClub servers are no more as I have officially vacated the collocation premises that were used for the past 15 years. Now that the infrastructure has been migrated, things have been archived and all the little items lingering on old servers have been deal with we can move on.

Here is one last tribute to the old servers. :)


 
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