server stack updates

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
May 062011
 

We are planning to upgrade the XEN server stack sometime in the next two weeks.

Unfortunately this process will involve some down-time for all of our hosted clients.

The upgrade will take the current servers from XEN 3 series hypervisor to a XEN 4  series hypervisor and upgrade the underlying Linux kernel to the current Debian 6 provided versions. As part of the upgrade process we will distribute the new kernel modules to all XEN virtual servers.

The upgrade is driven by the desire to take advantage of the improvements that XEN 4 series hypervisors bring in terms of performance CPU, I/O and RAM and to enable some of the more stable and faster virtual devices and associated management features.

We will be contacting our hosted clients over the next few days to work out the best time for the outage .

 Posted by tmc at 09:45

Fixing Australian time zones in plone

 News, People, plone, software, System Updates, tech, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Mar 132011
 

One of our clients, the Ancient Arts Fellowship have requested a new Plone site.

After some deliberation and several futile attempts to upgrade their current Plone 2.5.5 to a plone 3.x instance we made a collective decision to run with a new Plone 4 setup.

Of course the “curse of the time zone” reared its ugly head and bit us on the bum.

the “Curse of the Time Zone” arises when (for reasons historic and political) there is a collsion between the GNU/Linux timezone names and those expected by zope/Plone framework. This happend because the GNU/Linux servers call Australian and US time zones “EST” and “EDT”… while zope/plone stack calles them AEDT, AEST for Australia and  EDT and EST for USA.

Ultimately the solution is to set a timezone variable inside of the Zope framework to take care of the differences, but that problem is what to call it…  Australia/Canberra and Australia/Sydney did not work . But after a few searches and trial and error we found this magic string  “AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3″ it seems to work.

so the process is:

  • build your zope/plone stack.
  • go to base.cf in $TARGET/zinstance
  • add the follwing lines to [instance] section:
      environment-vars =
          TZ AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3

 

 Posted by tmc at 23:59

Upgrading postgresql databse server software on Debian Squeeze

 News, People, System Updates, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Mar 062011
 

I am very happy to report, that just as just as was described in the PostgreSQL update post the same process works flawlessly for migrating postgresql  8.3.x to 8.4.x on Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0)

 Posted by tmc at 23:23

Server outage 22:30 AEDT, Tuesday 01/02/2011

 News, System Updates, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Jan 312011
 

An outage is required to activate linux kernel patches as detailed in DSA 2153-1 -linux-2.6 security update.

Current schedule is for 22:30 to 23:00 on AEDT on Tuesday 01/02/2011
Service will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes

 Posted by tmc at 19:45

Outage Advisory 2010-11-30 20:00 to 20:30 AEDT.

 Industry News, News, System Updates  No Responses »
Nov 282010
 

Outage Advisory 2010-11-30 20:00 to 20:30 AEDT.

A scheduled server maintenance outage will take place between 20:00 and 20:30 AEDT on 30/11/2010.

We expect that the actual service interruption will take about 10 minutes
because a reboot of the server is required.

 Posted by tmc at 20:18

Hosting Joint Venture Launched

 Dale Baldwin, News, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Nov 252010
 

Vandrad Research Labs are proud to announce that together with Mr Dale Baldwin of dalebaldwin.com we have launched a new web services and hosting joint venture to support Dale and his growing web design and consultancy business based out of Hobart in Tasmania.

Recently Mr Baldwin has advised that this arrangement has allowed him to close two deals in a very short period of time. Excellent work Dale, and we look forward to having our inaugural customers on board very shortly.

 Posted by tmc at 06:59

Only 6 static IP addresses left…

 News, System Updates, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Nov 222010
 

We did some system accounting last night – we only have 6 more static IP addresses left.

We still have reasonable amount of RAM and a lot CPU cycles and several hundred gigabytes of HDD space in reserve but we can only cater for 6 more dedicated Xen Linux servers, and two of those are currently reserved for existing projects (one server is being built, with another server order expected soon).

This means I am in position to offer only 4 more dedicated Xen Linux servers and after that we are at capacity as far as provisioning of new Xen Linux systems on our main hosting system.

If you are looking for a server to host your websites, blogs, email or e-commerce, look us up at VandradLabs. I am sure we can come up with a hosting solution that suits your needs.

 Posted by tmc at 05:15  Tagged with: , ,

More RAM…

 News, System Updates, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Nov 022010
 

We have ordered more RAM for our hosting servers. This will allow us to host more clients and provide mode dedicated resources per client on each server.

 Posted by tmc at 22:30

New Blog Crated

 People, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Sep 052010
 

Today I created a new WordPress Blog engine instance for “Rational Capital” – http://www.rationalcapital.com.au/ – which is a sceptic and rational thought blog run by a very good friend of ours, a certain Mr Andrew Gould.

We look forward to see what Mr Gould has in store for us.

 Posted by tmc at 23:16

hosting servers – maintenance window

 System Updates, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Aug 222010
 

Server maintenance window required. At the moment scheduled for Tue, 24 Aug 2010 from 20:30 to 21:30 AEST. Email to hosting clients will follow.

 Posted by tmc at 10:20
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