Planned maintenance

[Nexus]

Hi folks, am shutting down shortly for an hour or so for hardware maintenance

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, hardware maintenance is completed, server back online - added PCI-ex device(s) which in turn required reallocating pci devices to various operating systems, as making one change tends to invalidate the whole config requiring devices to be reassigned.

Possibly another outage coming in next few days, but will avoid shutdown if I can. Next service can probably be performed without shutdown.

[Nexus]

There will be a brief outage this evening for minor hardware maintenance - I expect about 30 minutes.

[Nexus]

Some further issues to address. Will likely be at least one more outage before I'm done tonight.

There will be a brief outage this evening for minor hardware maintenance - I expect about 30 minutes.

[Nexus]

Some further issues to address. Will likely be at least one more outage before I'm done tonight.

Second restart ended up being this morning because it took that long to purge an oversized VM snapshot.
There'll be another outage and restart(s) this evening as I attempt to resolve a hardware issue with a Radeon video card associated with a linux station OS. It's possible the card has developed a fault. OzMPS runs alongside two dozen other operating systems on one of two servers in VIC and a third in QLD; PCI devices such as the video card are passed to individual operating systems that need them. I don't have hot-swappable PCI or live migration of VM OS so hardware maintenance like this necessitates outages.

In longer term ozmps will likely by migrated to a server that is more exclusively for web and network services, but that won't be happening until secondary VIC server is upgraded.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, we've had quite a long uptime run of some months, which is great, a couple of short internet disruptions notwithstanding. I will be taking server down sometime later today for some PCI device changes, and as with previous device upgrades and changes this will involve recording and recreating device to operating system associations which takes awhile. Might be down for an hour or two.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, the physical device installation went without a hitch, however reallocating devices to operating systems is proving less straight forward with some device combinations inducing hypervisor lockup. While this is investigated and tested further we may see some outages.

[Nexus]

Hi all, things are likely to be a bit slow for the next day or so due to a storage array recovery/transform task in progress.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, site is back online after 12hr outage related to the server storage maintenance. The recovery transform process slowed the storage down so much the webserver couldn't put up with it. The storage maintenance looks set to continue for a few more days, so I have moved the website to solid state storage, which although it is also slower than usual due to the maintenance tasks in progress, is fast enough to make up the difference and then some. You may find the site to be faster than before, and it will shift to warp speed once the array maintenance is complete.

[Nexus]

Storage maintenance is complete. The website was moved to solid state storage during this process to address extreme slowness that storage maintenance was causing. Performance should now be somewhat faster than the service usually was prior to the maintenance task.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, we've had a few outages of an hour or two over the last couple of days due to hardware reconfiguration and maintenance. Will avoid further downtime if possible.

[Nexus]

Trying to get a new operating system into a compatible hardware configuration - am testing alternative pci-ex hardware this evening, which will require one or more shutdowns.
ozmps will be offline while maintenance is performed.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone,

The server hosting ozMPSclub will be getting some upgrades to extend it's service lifetime.
We will be shutting down to upgrade the CPU's from 2.4Ghz 12 thread Xeon to 3.6Ghz 12 thread Xeon - will provide a nice speed boost
At a later date the memory capacity will be extended from 96Gb to 192Gb RAM

Which will be it's final specifications until the day it is retired. That's it's most extreme specification reached.

There's unlikely to be any great noticable performance difference from the website - perhaps a little quicker responding, however OzMPS only uses a few threads and a few Gb of memory.

Shutdown likely to happen this morning.

Regards

James

EOL_Upgrade.jpg

[Nexus]

CPU upgrades have been installed. Happy with the result. There is I think some larger level 1 and 2 caches on these CPU, so as well as the 45% kick in CPU clock, there's reduced latency everywhere and possibly some more effective cache accelleration. Seem to have better than expected performance gains on the website. How obvious that will be to members and guests I'm not certain. Better page response and load times will be notable I think.

[Nexus]

I am doing some maintenance to advertising components. Not changing the layout, just servers associated with providing them. If I revert the live website to a snapshot it's because I broke something. If you lose a post, my apologies in advance.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone, very brief outage a few minutes ago as I enabled HTTPS rewriting on all incoming HTTP connections
What this means :
(1) Web-browsers can no longer communicate with the website unencrypted, all http web connections are forced onto HTTPS encryption
(2) Why does my browser warn that some elements are not encrypted? Because there are still references to HTTP in the website code. The code needs cleaning of these hard links. Your browser still asks for it by http and is told by the server to use https instead.
(3) How will it effect the website? There should be no visible difference. Some connections made by your browser are now transferring data encrypted that were not before.
(4) When will the browser stop warning about unencrypted elements such as images? When I cleanup these pieces of website code that specify HTTP. Instead of providing data over HTTP the server now redirects the browser to use HTTPS. When the website has browsers use HTTPS directly this warning will go away.

Alterations to advertising server sources remain pending.

If there are any issues, please let me know by direct message or leave a message on the facebook group and I will look into.

Changes are minimal I do not expect any issues to arise from changes

[Nexus]

Hi everyopne OzMPS will be down for a while this afternoon while I perform hardware maintenance on the host hypervisor. I am upgrading memory from 96Gb to 192Gb. You may see abnormally slow responses while network infrastructure is shutdown and restarted. I anticipate being back online in an hour or so.

[Nexus]

Have had some issues with a perimeter router (internet connection) and internal network routing the last week or so. There is likely to be interruptions to service while I investigate and resolve. May be rebuilding some network components if necessary.

[Nexus]

Failed perimeter router has been replaced and internal routing issues have been traced and resolved.

[Nexus]

Hi everyone. The victoria datacenter site that houses ozmpsclub.com - also my residence - may need to relocate in the near future. Yes, potentially in the middle of a pandemic. The owner has suddenly begun to express interest in doing maintenance that for three years they have studiously ignored and seemingly only reluctantly addressed issues that needed attention. The scope of required maintenance is such that it won't be possible to complete all of while occupied. This isn't committed to yet, but my expectation is that it will be because if they don't do it the property will inevitably cease to be viable. Great timing guys.

So I am currently in the process of shuffling operating systems around so that email services and ozmpsclub are running from QLD site. This will allow ozmpsclub and essential lateralcognition IT systems to remain online while the datacenter is moved.

There are a few things that this places on the backburner. Moving my studio and datacenter is no small task, however on the upside it should come with a more reliable internet connection.