We already backup files from servers in Altanta to servers in Dallas, and from Dallas to Altanta, as well as local compressed (gzip’ed tarballs and vzdumps). But as  of today, we’re implementing yet another remote backup feature too… The compressed backups will be pulled down from the various servers and stored in New Orleans as well.  We’re tweaking the process, and will have to get an idea of the time and bandwidth usage, but the backups will be at least weekly, and I suspect much more often up to possibly daily if all goes well. The initial testing is undergoing now. And it’s looking pretty good! We’ve bought a NAS unit and are storing it in the office here. We’ve tweaking the software in it to open up the version of linux it runs. That allowed us to setup rsync services… So far we’re very pleased with this little NAS unit - a D-Link DNS-321.

Update 4/28: We’re very impressed with the little NAS unit.  But the bandwidth required to do these backups prohibits us from doing them too often. We’re scheduling them for Sundays during off hours. We don’t want to use up too bandwidth for backups of backups to the point we’re competing with real traffic.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

The Dallas servers are currently unreachable.   A ticket with the d.c. has been put in.

Servers are again reachable 5 minutes later – waiting to hear from virtbiz what happened.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

The backup server will be reconfigured this weekend… Online backups will be unavailable during that time. Afterwards, the 7 day history will not be available. Due to some permissions issues leading to a LOT of waster space we can’t get back, we’re restructuring the backup system. 

VPS customers – your vzdumps will be unaffected. Your daily backup is still safe.

Shared hosting - we’re going to borrow some space on another server temporarily to run your remote backup. The nightly dumps are unaffected.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

The VPS node gt24-1 lost one of it’s drives early Sunday morning… On Monday we had newegg ship out a replacement drive overnight directly to the data center. On mid-day Tuesday it arrived, and Tulix replaced the failed drive for us while keeping the server up.  As I write this, the replacement drive is building it’s mirrors.

This is precisely why we run the hardware as we do. On this particular server, gt24-1, we use RAID10 to provide speed and fault-tolerance. Because of this extra protection no data was lost, and the server continued to function even during the drive replacement itself.

And we’d like to extend a sincere thanks to Tulix Systems who houses the gt24-1 server for the excellent service they provide… With them there, doing the hands-on work, we can relax and know that they will take care of us and our customers quickly and professionally. Thanks Guys!

Update 6:30pm:  The mirror re-sync has completed… GT24-1 is back in full RAID10 mode.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

Shared Reseller migrations continue from linux1 to gt20-1…

How to tell if your account has been moved yet… if you lookup your ip and it ends 220.242 and not 219.242 then you’ve been moved. Or if you log into DirectAdmin and down at the bottom you see a link for Installatron, you’ve been moved.

If you haven’t been moved yet, it will be occurring soon… We are moving accounts 1 at a time and trying to be thorough on checking that they move properly… running a backup right before the switch, and then immediately moving the account.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

Shared Reseller accounts will be moved to the new server over the weekend.  In preparation, we have dropped the DNS cache time to 100 seconds. This should minimize the likelyhood of a dns server holding onto the wrong ip address after the move… provided the dns server is setup properly. A recent experience inidicates not all are.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

We are pleased to announce that with the migration to the new server for the shared reseller accounts, we are now offering Installatron as a standard feature. Consider it another little bit of Lagniappe… 

Installatron is the premiere auto-installer and auto-upgrade plugin for the cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, Plesk, and LxAdmin web-hosting control panels.

Installatron’s powerful, easy to use user-interface gives you and your users the ability to install and upgrade a growing collection of web applications at the click of a button.

 

The LXAdmin control panel that is standard with VPS accounts has a similar feature included with it, however for those VPS customers desiring Installatron instead, we’ll happily arrange it for $2.50 per month.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

In an effort to keep current to make transitioning to the new server as painless as possible, we have upgraded DirectAdmin again. Only a few minor things were changed in this revision, but as one of them concerned backups and we’re about to use that feature extensively in the migration, we thought it best to have the 2 servers on the same exact version.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

The new shared reseller server, gt20-1, has arrived in Dallas and has started it’s final configuration, hardening and check-out…  Sometime this weekend we we expect to start the migration from linux1 to gt20-1.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

The replacement server for linux1, gt20-1, is on it’s way to Dallas… The new server should be placed in the Dallas d.c. by mid-week and left to run idle a couple of days after it’s journey.  The transition from linux1 to gt20-1 will begin sometime this weekend or early next week, and will attempted to be done during off-peak hours. Your sites will experience some outages but we will make every attempt to minimize them.

This is a signifigant upgrade:
Linux1 is a Supermicro P4 with 2GB of RAM and dual 300GB drives in RAID1. While the replacement is a Tyan Dual P4 3GHz Xeon with hyperthreading, 6GB of RAM, and 4x 750GB “RAID Edition” hard drives in hardware based RAID10 (striped and mirrored) configuration.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.