Man, have I been busy. I’m working on setting up monitoring software for a server cluster (Nagios) and it’s not the most user-friendly program.

Anyway, UltraMonkey. The suggested amount of servers for my setup is Five, and I’m using two. I had to convince the Hosting Provider to grant me a block of IPs that could be switched between any of my servers in order to make it work. Basically what happens is you connect to the website via IP. The Director accepts your connection, and sends you to one of two webservers (called “real servers”). If one webserver goes down, it only directs your request to the server that’s up so there’s no timeouts.  If the main director goes down, The backup server recognizes this, and grabs the IP address. This allows me to pull a server down and work on it if something’s wrong or it needs an update without any interuption to the end users.  It took me an entire week just to set it up, though

Another major accomplishment I made was moving LivingWithStyle to a new server.  This wouldn’t have been so difficult had the old server not been running outdated software.  The version of vB is older, It was running a 4.0.x version of MySQL and a 4.0.x version of PHP.  It’s now running MySQL 5.0.x, PHP 5.1.2, and Apache 2.1.x.  The move of a 4 gig database took just over an hour.  I was damn proud of myself.

I’ll try to update this Blog more. I promise