Day: September 27, 2005

Servers and whatnot.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, if you have absolutely no interest in listening to me prattle on about servers, you can go right ahead and skip this post. :-)

I had planned on doing some upgrades to my servers this past weekend. Obviously, with the storm coming through, that didn’t happen… which is a bit irritating. A couple of weeks ago, Slackware Linux 10.2 was released, and I was planning on upgrading my two main servers up to it. I can’t do it this weekend, though… Fight Night is on Monday, and I can’t risk a botched upgrade keeping me offline until then. I’ll probably do the upgrade a week from Saturday; fortunately all of the user data (including mailboxes) is kept on a separate hard drive from the operating system itself. It’ll just be a bit of a pain to get all of my server software recompiled and operational.

On the other hand, we did manage to make the “datacenter” area of the house look a lot nicer a week ago last Sunday. While I was at Fry’s the previous day, I managed to get my hands on a four-port KVM switch with cables that was on sale for $35. So, we ended up moving my test server out of another room, and putting it with the two main servers. We also cleaned up all the cables, got them organized and tied down, and now the setup looks a lot neater. The only disadvantage that we found was that having three servers on that APC BackUPS Pro 350 doesn’t exactly work. I had managed to trip a breaker while reheating pizza in my room’s microwave, and the UPS didn’t even last a minute before giving out. I’ll probably have to pick up a BackUPS Pro 1000 or something over the next week or two. For now, though, the test server is just plugged into a surge suppressor; it doesn’t need to be on 24/7. Oh, well.

I had a bit of fun with servers last night, too. With the release of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, the Mortal Kombat Online server was seriously dragging under the weight of the extra traffic. I ended up doing some research on fine-tuning the Apache (webserver) and MySQL (database) installs, and after taking a look at the configuration settings on both, I came to a rather nasty revelation. Apparently, as part of my desperate and frantic efforts to get the server working during the first days of the botched V.7 upgrade, I had made some serious screwups with the Apache installs. For example, the system was generating more spare processes than maximum allowed client connections. In other words, the system had a LOT of spare Apache processes running that would never be used. I ended up scaling that back and making it a lot more sane. I also tweaked some of the cache settings for MySQL. The end result was that the MK Online site started being a LOT more responsive. We’ll see if this keeps up, but if it does, it’s certainly a weight off our own shoulders. One of the problems with running site software developed in-house is that if stuff goes wrong, it’s up to you to figure out how to fix it.

Anyway, enough of this… I need to go check on a few things here at the office. Fun…

Another week…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, things have pretty much returned to normal around here, for the most part. I’m back at my desk, listening to stuff on iTunes, waiting for support requests to come in via email and/or the phone. Most of my coworkers have come back to work, and life goes on.

It’s actually a bit of a relief, in a way. It’s just been a bit off the past week or so. Even yesterday felt that way; then again, I had arranged with my boss that I would be working from home because I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d be able to get gas. I did get some around lunchtime, after Mom told me the Shell station at the entrance to my neighborhood was serving customers. I wasn’t really missed per se, as my laptop was on the corporate VPN and my office phone was forwarded to my cell phone. I was able to get work done without any issues. It’s just… it feels more like work now that I’m back in my office. Weird as it might be to say, at least everything seems to be back on the straight and narrow.

Oh, Louie called me last night… turns out he didn’t get out of town after all. He got as far as Conroe before giving up and heading back to his apartment. Just as well… he got less effects from the hurricane than I did. Heh.

At this point now, the big thing I have to look forward to is Fight Night. For those of you not aware of it, Fight Night is MK Online’s series of chats with celebrities in the world of Mortal Kombat. The next Fight Night chat is Monday, and it’s with the development team of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I don’t mind saying, it’s going to be a strain… I’m the one who has to maintain the technical side of things while Scott Howell hosts the event and handles the questions from the fans, plus does the main interaction with the team. Usually after Fight Nights I end up taking a month leave of absence from the site, as the strain gets to me and I need to take a break. I guess I should look on the bright side… ]{0MBAT would have had to have taken my place had Hurricane Rita made me unavailable for the event, and the way he was worrying over it, he would have had a coronary by the time the night was over. :-)

Anyway, I’ll probably have a post a bit later concerning servers and related matters, so unless you don’t mind my tech talk feel free to pass that one up. For now, I need to go get my retractable network cable from Anderson (who I let borrow it when I left Villahermosa)… fun fun.