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On July 10, 2007, Apolyton Civilization Site moved its main operations over to a new server named "Settler IV". Its predecessor, "Settler III", is currently being retired after over two years of near-flawless service. The immediate motivation for this changeover was a problem with "Settler III" spontaneously and frequently rebooting for reasons that proved quite difficult to diagnose and still aren't fully understood, although by now we've narrowed the problem down to a specific logging system.
The ultimate reasons for upgrading to a new server are unrelated to this incident though. Apolyton's technical staff has been preparing for a server upgrade for some months now and "Settler IV" already came online on June 15, 2007 -- exactly one month ago. The primary reasons for this decision were disk space and security concerns: the hard-drives of "Settler III" were nearing maximum capacity and its dated hardware and software increasingly posed a security liability. The original intention was to gradually re-build "Settler IV" from the ground up -- to install the latest versions of our back-end software and infrastructure (Apache, PHP, SQL, IRCd, etc), to internally reorganise the site and to institute new security policies. We intended to only switch over the website itself once it the foundation for it was 100% ready. This approach would provide us a much more secure and better organised system in the long run and at the same time lay the foundation for future improvements to the 'front-end', i.e. the website itself.
However, our desire to quickly resolve the problems with "Settler III" led to the decision to speed up this process and move the site over to "Settler IV" sooner than planned. It is currently still running in an isolated environment though, so that our plans to rebuild the server from scratch can continue more or less unchanged while we still provide a new and (more) stable home for the website in the interim. That being said, the 'front-end' systems on the website such as the Directory and the forums were never designed to work on this new server with it's very modern software backbone. We've hastily had to improvise to make everything work and are still fixing problems around the site. If you encounter any issues in using the site please report them; in the mean time we ask for your patience as we resolve these and gradually move the site over to the main environment of "Settler IV".
Once this has been completed (in the hopefully not-too-distant future) we intend to start making some improvements to the forums and main site as well, to implement some of the changes that have been both publicly and internally proposed and discussed over the past year or so.
In the mean time, here are some technical stats about "Settler IV", for the geeks in our community
Processors: Intel Xeon 3060 (2.4GHz) Dual Core (was Dual Xeon 2.4)
RAM: 2048MB (same as Settler III)
Hard Drives: 2x250GB RAID1 (was 2x70GB non-RAID)
Operating System: CentOS Enterprise Linux (was RedHat Enterprise)
Yours truly,
----------
Wouter Snijders
Co-Owner/Administrator
Apolyton Civilization Site
The ultimate reasons for upgrading to a new server are unrelated to this incident though. Apolyton's technical staff has been preparing for a server upgrade for some months now and "Settler IV" already came online on June 15, 2007 -- exactly one month ago. The primary reasons for this decision were disk space and security concerns: the hard-drives of "Settler III" were nearing maximum capacity and its dated hardware and software increasingly posed a security liability. The original intention was to gradually re-build "Settler IV" from the ground up -- to install the latest versions of our back-end software and infrastructure (Apache, PHP, SQL, IRCd, etc), to internally reorganise the site and to institute new security policies. We intended to only switch over the website itself once it the foundation for it was 100% ready. This approach would provide us a much more secure and better organised system in the long run and at the same time lay the foundation for future improvements to the 'front-end', i.e. the website itself.
However, our desire to quickly resolve the problems with "Settler III" led to the decision to speed up this process and move the site over to "Settler IV" sooner than planned. It is currently still running in an isolated environment though, so that our plans to rebuild the server from scratch can continue more or less unchanged while we still provide a new and (more) stable home for the website in the interim. That being said, the 'front-end' systems on the website such as the Directory and the forums were never designed to work on this new server with it's very modern software backbone. We've hastily had to improvise to make everything work and are still fixing problems around the site. If you encounter any issues in using the site please report them; in the mean time we ask for your patience as we resolve these and gradually move the site over to the main environment of "Settler IV".
Once this has been completed (in the hopefully not-too-distant future) we intend to start making some improvements to the forums and main site as well, to implement some of the changes that have been both publicly and internally proposed and discussed over the past year or so.
In the mean time, here are some technical stats about "Settler IV", for the geeks in our community
Processors: Intel Xeon 3060 (2.4GHz) Dual Core (was Dual Xeon 2.4)
RAM: 2048MB (same as Settler III)
Hard Drives: 2x250GB RAID1 (was 2x70GB non-RAID)
Operating System: CentOS Enterprise Linux (was RedHat Enterprise)
Yours truly,
----------
Wouter Snijders
Co-Owner/Administrator
Apolyton Civilization Site
yes, it was working before. 
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