Some regulars may have noticed some glitchiness with SPCR over the past half day. The reason is simple: The site has been transitioning to a new server and the DNS nameservers have been resolving the new address. It may continue to point to the old machine for some hours longer for some people, but by the end of the 19th, the transition should be complete everywhere on the web.

We've made a major upgrade, stepping up to our own dual-cpu, dual-core Operon 280 machine with 8 GBs of memory & four Seagate Savvio 10krpm SAS drives in RAID 10.

More on this in an article to come later. Meanwhile, we're busy making sure everything is back in its proper place as before.

But is it quiet?

Greetings,



I can't hear it -- can you? So -- it is silent...

FYI, we are aware that...

1) the "SPCR Forums" latest posts on the right column of the main site hasn't refreshed in almost a day, and...
2) the SPCR icon is not showing up on your web browser navigation bar in the forums.

Just to let you know... it's working for me in Konquerer on SuSE.



Pete

Very nice! This place has come a long way since my old trolling days.

I’m wondering what places the highest demand on your Server, the main site or running the Forums? I get the impression that running a forum can be surprisingly hardware intensive.

I get the favicon now and then, seems to vary between page loads.

Running forums can be very server intensive depending on how busy they are and the software in use - mosty due to database accesses.

The change over still hasn't made it to the Aliant name servers on the east coast - I'm going through a proxy I have on my website to access this after some friends told me the site was in fact up.

I believe we always claimed that having your computer in another room was always the quietest. So this is brilliant. I can just see MikeC sticking some stupid Thermaltake fan on the server, firing it up, listening to it howl, and then chuckle as he gets into his car and drives away. Yes, I know what you do at night, Mike. You're like one of those politicians who campaigns against something and then get busted at it.

How come my firefox bookmark toolbar doesn't have an SPCR icon? It keeps showing the [H] from HardOCP. I knew the H was taking over, but this is ridiculous.

Yup, it's pretty damn noisy. I think I measured something like ~50dBA@1m during testing. But priority #1 was stability under load, and in a 2U box, there just isn't any room for real airflow, it's supposed to go only front to back and the cramped distance is nearly 3 feet. There are 3 80mm fans blowing in about 1/3 of the way in from the front, and a 60mm fan in back blowing out. Plus the 80mm fan in the PSU and the fans on two Zalman 7000CU (the best we could find to it in this thing). Even with all the fans going full tilt, the Operton 280s were reaching nearly 70C at some point. It looks like it's cool enough in the data center, which is airconditioned. We may decide to mod the cover with vents directly over the HSFs to get some direct outside air in. There is almost no clearance between the top cover and the fans in the HS. Turns out there's some room between the machines in the rack to make this possible.

Amazingly, this noisy machine could not be heard from a foot or two away in the colocation data center. We could only tell it was on by seeing the light on the front panel come on. That's how noisy it was in there. Imagine about 100 loud window-hanging air-conditioners going full blast in a big concrete room. You get the picture?


It should be working now; our favicon is in place. Works for me.

My own personal version of hell. It must feel like someone is taking a chainsaw to your ears.

We had to spend nearly two hours in there and I tell ya, I was feeling pretty stressed out by the time we got out of there. Immediately had to run for a beer with Richard. Good thing there was a pub nearby & it was friday evening.

Propogation finally got here

I always keep a pair of the soft malleable plastic earplugs for use when I have to spend any amount of time in a machine room. Years spent with mainframes taught me that one.

Heh, yeah that's one of my rules too.

Speak up, I can't hear you!

Just thought... does this mean the forum clock can be kept reasonably accurate now? ...


And a quick tech question if I may Mike... with two servers running at the same time for a while, how did you deal with forum posting? i.e. if I were DNS'd to the 'old' server, the post wouldn't be on the new server... or am I missing something like two forums but one database?


Regards
Pete

I can imagine the noise.. Just yesterday i was in a room with three huge blade servers wich are supposed to be energy efficient, but man were they noisy

time --- probably.

The forum was shut down, the forum data copied to the new server, and made active there. Immediately thereafter, the name server change was made. When the DNS brought traffic to the new server, the forum was simply picking up exactly where the old box left off. The period during which the forum was unavailable for me as around 6 hours. It may have been shorter for some & longer for others.

What you could've done to reduce the downtime due to DNS: create a new domain in advance (new.silentpcreview.com) and have it point to the new server. Then you can have the old server redirect to the new domain and there's less downtime due to DNS.

the favicon

I just checked and SPCR is giving me a 16x16 1.4kb favicon.ico do you really think that is big enough to be an issue?

Hmm converting the favicon to 16 colors seems like a good trick since it's just blue and white. It reduced the file size from 1406 bytes to 318 bytes.