Power surge and server crash
Yesterday we had a power surge at home. I noticed around 10 am when the website was not responding. When I went back home, I found both the webserver and my gateway machine both having errors and ubuntu halting at “run fsck manually”. Luckily, I was able to fix the webserver without a re-install. I have keep daily backups from both my postgres and mysql databases by dumping them around 4:00 am daily. The dump is stored on a separate hardrive, which gets unmounted after the dump completes.
I had to re-install the gateway machine. On the good side I got to re-install gutsy instead my older feisty installation. No data lost, as I keep my /home always on a separate partition, I only had to re-install the OS.
To prevent future damages and save time, I bought a UPS 900KVA , which should be fully charged when I go back today. Also, I got a KVM switch, instead to moving the monitor, keyboard and mouse connections over the four machines.
Technorati Tags: feisty, ups, apc, gutsy, ubuntu, linux, reformatTags: apc, feisty, gutsy, Linux, ubuntu, ups
November 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am
M,
Just as an FYI, I’ve had few minor issues here and there with the KVM switch. Mainly when trying to download updates for attached peripherals. The problems were easily corrected by unhooking the KVM switch.
Regards,
LaMont
November 19th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
This is the one I’m using. I got it from microcenter in Rockville. Didn’t have any troubles till now. I use the four ports, three with desktops and the fourth with my laptop but it seems that there’s no issues with the devices talking to one another.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:34 am
How many homes are in your database?
How do you make it so fast?
December 14th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I have more than 60,000 homes in the database, and I believe that it can easily grow to more than half a million without any troubles.
It’s good that you think its fast, even after I downgraded the machine. The old machine had a dual core Opteron on 1GB RAM. I actually found that I get a very reasonable performance on a Sempron 64 bit also on 1GB of RAM, I just had to correctly schedule priorities ! board & processor $75, ram $41 and I had an old case.
I use GNU/Linux (ubuntu), apache, postgres & php and edit using emacs. Its all about how you design your database, creating the correct indexes and using the powerful features in your tools. PHP is very fast. Adding a database whether it is mysql or postgres, will slow it down. It then becomes your job to optimize queries so that scripts run faster. There’s no magic or secrets about it.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Impressive. I can’t imagine anybody thinking it is slow. Probably 5 times faster than any other site I have seen.
And why are you a realtor again?
I don’t even get all that database stuff. You say “design your database” but then you say “adding a database” slows it down. So if you have no database…?
December 14th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
You’ve got to store the information some where. I store it in postgresql (http://www.postgresql.org), which is an excellent database management system. PHP is a scripting language that delivers HTML information to your browser. Then PHP should query postgresql for listing information and then delivers it to your browser for you to see the website.
If PHP didn’t have to query any database, it will be extremely fast. Querying the database is the slow part, and is the part that requires most engineering effort in order to make pages appear fast.
In regards to real estate, I’m in real estate because I like real estate
! It’s exactly the same as I like developing website & research…. I enjoy doing real estate transactions, that’s why people benefit when buying with me.