Server Upgrade

by Chris Lobban, Chief Programmer

8th November 2011

Just a heads up for everybody, next weekend (November 18th through 20th) we will be performing a server upgrade from our current server to a new one. In theory, the process should be fairly seamless... however as always with this type of work, there is a chance of large issues surfacing. And I always prefer to plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

The current plan is that we will take the website offline to perform backups at around noon EST on Friday. This could last approximately an hour. We will then begin the process of transitioning all of our files to the new server. Once that is complete, the IP address will be redirected from the current server to the new server. This process could take up to three days as the new IP address has to gradually propagate to all of the DNS servers across the Internet, so the site outage could last as much as three days for you, depending on your internet service provider. If you see the site available (and apparently functional) before Monday, I'd still suggest that you refrain from posting anything too important (to the forums, tournament reports, etc) because if there are any problems over the weekend we might have to roll back to the backups from Friday at noon, so anything posted after that is in danger of being reverted. Hopefully the site should be back online and fully functional for all of our users by Monday morning. Over the course of the weekend, please follow our Twitter feed @TrekCC for up to the minute details as things progress.

For those that are interested (or just like staring blankly and saying "ooh, pretty numbers"), this server upgrade will see us move from a dual-core 2.1 GHz server with 1 GB of RAM, up to a dual-core 2.6 GHz server with 4 GB of RAM. This is a fairly significant upgrade, and should help immensely with some of the server issues that we'd been having recently. And assuming that this upgrade is indeed successful in helping us to alleviate our recent issues, I'd like to invite everybody to Donate to help us continue to pay for these server costs. Anything that you can give, however small, will be appreciated. Remember, it's your donations that keep this website running, and we couldn't do it without you.