Info: BA4 & BA5

[TeaLeaf]

As you all know BlackAdder4 suffered a hardware failure last Thursday morning.  Gandalf & Oldbloke visited the rack on Saturday and pulled BA4 out of the rack (along with our NAS) and took them away for further investigation after BA4 refused to boot up and remain stable.   Oldie's testing points at the PSU and we have bought replacements which are en route.   Once installed and retested we'll be looking to bring BA4 back into service, but probably in a different role.

The bottom line is that BA4 is over 5 years old now so the chances of further hardware failures is much higher than with a  new box.   Council's view is that irrespective of whether BA4 can be repaired it is now time to replace BA4, so in the mean time the plan should be:

-forums restored from backups and moved to run on a virtual private server (this provides us with much higher resilience and removes BA4 as a single point of failure) - ALREADY DONE
-BA4 temporarily reinstalled to the data-centre (if the repair works) to allow game servers & TS to be run (the TS is currently being run on my fibre) - DONE BUT FAILED
-in the mean time BlackAdder5 is to be purchased (being specced and investigated) - IN PROGRESS
-BA5 will replace BA4 in the data-centre as soon as feasible and will take over as our main game server
-BA4 (assuming the repair was successful) is to move into a backup role only

From our research so far a budget of about £1,500 - £2,000 should allow us to purchase an appropriate server with lights out management, additional RAM and disks.   We currently have about £1,500 in the bank and want to keep some of that to meet month to month costs, so we'll be doing a bit of fund-raising to close the gap between what we want to keep in the bank and the final price of the server.    We consider a hardware purchase is still the best route rather than renting a dedicated server.   A dedicated server rental does cost more over the expected lifetime of the server than the cost of purchasing the hardware, particularly once you include the additional RAM and disk requirements, so the purchase route is the one we think will give us the server, control and access we require.

All being well, we hope to order BA5 this week and any immediate shortfall will be underwritten to allow the purchase to go ahead, with fund-raising to follow as required.

We hope that this brings you up to speed with what has gone on over the past few days and on behalf of us all I'd like to thank those involved for their time and assistance in getting this resolved.

Apologies for the down time, but we're back up for now and will bring game servers online again as soon as possible.

Please feel free to let your GAs know the situation and we'll be posting something for the members when we start the server fund-raising process!


For reference:  
BA4 cost us £1,710 five years ago, so a monthly equivalent of £28.50 which is pretty stunning value!

[Gone_Away]

I'm in for £20..

[Jamin]

Yeah, just donated some into the bank account :thumb:

Cheers for all the work done to get us back up and running, the racing section is fine using the Monkeys server for the time being... the one we tried to get them to host with us :lol:

[TeaLeaf]

Thanks folks, your generosity is much appreciated.

I'll take this info public now and let's see if it generates some donations.

[TeaLeaf]

Quick update to keep everyone apprised:

BA4 was repaired (replacement PSUs) and reinstalled into the rack yesterday.   It seemed to work fine so Oldie & Gandy left the Telehouse and went home, meanwhile we did some Windows security updates on BA4 prior to starting the game servers.  After installation and upon the mandatory reboot it went into a chkdsk and that's where it hung.    We're awaiting a manual power cycle, but it looks like BA4 may have had more than just PSU problems.

In the meantime, TS is pointed back to me again and the forum is running happily on the VMS.   We have selected an IBM server and last night dMw Council authorised the purchase.   Hopefully an order will be placed within 48 hours and we'll then have our long-term replacement server en route to the community.   Just for info, the new server will have a 'lights out' management on it so we should be able to power cycle ourselves in future.

[Blunt]

I just noticed that both CS servers are showing in hlsw

and I can join! :yahoo:

:dmw:

[OldBloke]

I just noticed that both CS servers are showing in hlsw

and I can join! :yahoo:

:dmw:

Yep. BA4 is back but not fully back to her old self. TS should be back shortly though

[Blunt]

Thanks for all your efforts.
Much appreciated

[Jamin]

LFS, Airio and stats are back and running fine :thumb:

Cheers guys for sorting the problem

[Sparko]

Minecraft looking good also

Thanks for all your efforts guys, greatly appreciated :thumbsup:

[TeaLeaf]

We're currently trying to source the preferred server in the UK.  More info to follow.

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