[Systems] sunjammer: downtime for relocation Sun, Sep 13 @ 22:30EST

[Bernie Innocenti]

Localized time information:
 UTC: Monday, September 14, 2009 at 03:30:00
 http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=13&year=2009&hour=23&min=30&sec=0&p1=43

The virtual machine Sunjammer (running multiple services for the domains
sugarlabs.org, ole.org, olenepal.org and codewiz.org) will go offline
for relocation this evening.  The downtime is projected to last 15-30
minutes, but it may last longer in case of unexpected issues.

Our new XEN host, cloud9.fsf.org, has faster processors, twice as much
memory, a faster RAID1 array and generally better hardware.  The
migration should mitigate the longstanding server overloading issue
caused by intense traffic on http://activities.sugarlabs.org during
weekdays.

A previous attempt to move Sunjammer on this machine failed because of
unreliable configuration of the memory banks.  This time, we believe we
have corrected the problem and verified this by running an extensive
test cycle with memtest86+.

Thanks to Daniel J. Clark of the FSF for all the time he has dedicated
to support Sugar Labs.


=== Addenda: Future plans for Sunjammer ===

Following this operation, I'm planning to split out a few critical
services from Sunjammer to a twin VM called "beamrider", to be hosted on
treehouse.sugarlabs.org, a new 2U box with 64GB of RAM kindly offered to
us by Stefan "dogi" Unterhauser.  I've completed some nasty burn-in
tests to verify the general stability of treehouse and I'm currently
still working to setup backups and monitoring.

Meanwhile, I'm also trying to figure out why virt-install is borked on
Jaunty.  It works decently on both Karmic and Fedora 11 (well, it's
barely usable on those too).  Hopefully one day libvirtd and its
associated tools will become so mature that I won't have to grep the
sources for error messages every time I want to do something as easy as
net-installing a new VM.  Until then, thank god it's free software.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/