Planned Upgrades, Read about upgrades to our Network

We are about to begin work on a 2 projects involving upgrading our bandwidth and our webserver. Once these 2 projects are completed we are going to see a noticable difference in how fast our website loads and functions. I also believe the time is right for this, as it will "bring in" new members who may not be as patient with the load times.

Since both of these projects carry with them a certain price tag, we would certainly would appreciate any help. We have included ways to help at the bottom of this message:

Project #1: Upgrade to business grade DSL doubling our bandwidth capacity and having our DNS server provided by Earthlink (no delays in page loading). This project will require the installation of a second phone line that will be optimized for connectivity. Mrs. Macfive is a electronics wiz so she will be installing the necessary phone wire and other items maybe this weekend.

Project #2: Replacement of our aging PIII webserver and O/S. We already have a Pentium 4 2.4 GHZ DELL computer for this project. We will need to purchase a 512K DDR memory (we already have 256k DDR memory), a fast 7,200 RPM 100 GIG hard drive(we will use our old 100 GIG drive as a backup device) and probably about 3 Network cards. We also will be purchasing a new Linux operating system which will include update support for security patches. Our new Linux system will also serve as a replacement to our router.

We hope to have these 2 projects completed within 1 month. For those wishing to support this endeavour, please feel free to help with one of the following:

If you havn't already become a Celtic Radio Founder, consider upgrading your account here:
http://founder.celticradio.net.

Donations can be made here:
http://www.celticradio.net/php/service_mod...?type=donations

And finally, purchasing from our Celtic Radio Gift store can be made here:
http://shop.celticradio.net

Thanks for your support!

Well, I am happy to report the new CelticRadio.net webserver is now online!

Not without alot of mishaps and unforseen problems. 12 hours later though, with the help of Mrs. Macfive, we were able to get everything up and running.

We have installed Redhat Fedora 4 as our webserver operating system. This will allow us to get the latest updates and security patches with a nice little update utility called 'Yum'.

We then created a directory share with our Win XP development computer, so we can edit the web files directly.

Our huge database has now been transferred to the new server and we are running atleast all databases off the new webserver. The rest of the files and other items will take a good 2-3 weeks to transfer over before we retire our aging PIII computer. It is a good thing too because I have been increasingly worried about the age of our webserver.

Thanks to all of the new Founder signs up in the last 2-3 days that has helped us finance this endeavour! Will keep you all posted on the progress. Thanks again!

Sorry for the down time the past 12-16 hours.

As stated above, our new webserver is up and running and we completed the moving of all of our databases.

Unfortunately, a nasty error message popped up last night which was causing parts of our site to not function. Had to back track, move hardware, reconfigure and reinstall the new webserver OS.

ERROR:

This was effecting all includes, scripts that make use of soap, and fopens, etc.

Just traced it a few minutes ago to the gateway address on the NIC of the old webserver. It somehow disappeared during all of the changes.

The only good thing about this is I located a bug thread here:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=11058

Its a closed bug thread, but I will post it here at CelticRadio.net and hopefully the search engines will allow some future poor soul the grief I encountered the past 12 hours! It seems to be a common problem for people setting up new servers or transfering to a new server. While for me it was the gateway address, it is possible that an underlying problem with DNS, nameserver - could result in the same issue.

We are going to take our time moving the website over to the new server after these events! I am cleaning up the server room and going out for breakfast. Sorry, will not be able to answer emails for the next few days. Need a break from this!

Poor guy.

Hope the breakfast was good. That ordeal would have driven me to seven-eight slices of french toast with butter and raspberry jam, canadian bacon, scrambled eggs and a couple pints of hot chocolate.

Thanks as always for all the hard work.