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Thursday - January 12, 2012 - 6:14AM
Posted By: Particle
Server Upgrade Project - Progress Report 2
Things are proceeding well for the new server. The Opteron 6234 12-core CPU arrived last week. Since the new platform can boot using regular DDR3 RAM instead of needing registered and/or ECC memory, I fired it up over the weekend for some tests using 8 GB in four channels. The system works well!
The only remaining parts for the server are four new hard drives, 32 GB of ECC/Reg DDR3, I/O shield, and the CPU heatsink. The heatsink was ordered with the CPU but just hasn't yet arrived.
We're looking at probably a February or March launch at this point.
Upgrades Progress
There has been progress made on the server upgrade project. Aoede will feature a Supermicro H8SGL-F motherboard. It's a single G34 socket server motherboard with 8 DIMM slots.
I'll be putting 32 GB of ECC/registered DDR3-1333 into it in a quad channel configuration to start by using four 8 GB DIMMs. I'll expand it later to 64 GB if needed.
As for the CPU, the system is going to receive an AMD Opteron 6234 CPU. That is a 12-core model that runs at 2.4 GHz stock but with 3.0 GHz turbo capability. CPU throughput overall hasn't been a limitation for us historically, but this should still prove to be a notable upgrade.
The disk system will also receive a nice overhaul. I'm looking at replacing all onboard disks with 300 GB 10K RPM drives. I'll probably use four disks set up in a RAID-10 array, replacing the two independent mirrors in use right now. That should help responsiveness while retaining redundancy.
Upgrades for the Server This Fall
The server upon which PCRPG and related services are hosted will soon see some upgrades. We're running on a dual, quad-core Opteron 2350 (2.0 GHz) with 16 GB of ECC/Reg DDR2-800 RAM currently. I'm hoping to upgrade to a single-socket system with a 12-core next-generation Opteron based on the upcoming Bulldozer core from AMD. RAM will be greatly expanded to 24 or 32 GB depending on cost. The disk subsystem will be upgraded to 10K or 15K drives most likely.
To you folks as users, nothing much will change. There will be some benefits like reduced resets on the TRPG server due to the realtime clock not being bugged anymore, but for the most part things will just move along smoothly.
A Brave, New Firewall
It's sort of a rare thing to see out in the wild these days, but I've put together a Pentium Pro machine. I've been fascinated by the Pentium Pro for years, and my interest was renewed some years ago when a classroom at the local college was cleaning out old junk hardware to throw away. One board just happened to be a Pentium Pro.
Immediately, my novelty detector was going off. I took it home, played with it for a few weeks, and then as suddenly as it had entered my life I'd shelved it. It simply wasn't practical to keep around since it only had 96 MB of RAM. I couldn't hardly run the nVidia display driver, yet alone anything else.
Lately, I've been moving into a new house. One day I found myself sitting over there in front of a bench computer that I'd taken over. Most of my stuff was still at my old location. It was clear that I was in need of a firewall box. I'd just been suffering through with Windows Firewall for a few days. I looked around for stuff that I had available over at the new location and noticed the Pentium Pro board had already made the trip. So began my new adventure. I decided I was going to install and run pfSense not on modern hardware but rather on this old thing for kicks.
The neat part is...it actually works really well.
I figured a few upgrades were in order. First, I bought 256 MB of RAM for it (EDO SIMMs). Then, I bought the top-of-the-line Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPU with 1 MB of L2 cache. Those things debuted at $2675 when they were new back in 1997. Fast forward to 2011 and I'd bargained with a guy selling brand new ones that have been in a tray all these years and picked one up for $25 shipped.
Now that everything is ticking along fine, it's neat. Sure, it can only manage 4-5 Mbps of AES-encrypted throughput for the VPN, but that's more than the upload link of either site can manage anyway. Some times, old technology can still be neat, especially when it was unaffordable back in the day but no big deal now.
Random Statistics
I thought I might take a moment and bore you fellas with some random statistics about the server for some kicks. I was surprised that there are this many active players still.
Established
Valentine's Day 2001 (10 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, 1 day ago)
Website Revision, Major
3rd Generation (2004 Redesign)
Last Server Clear
September 27, 2004 (6 years, 7 months, 2 days ago)
PCRPG's 10th Birthday, Belated
It's hard to imagine, but I completely forgot to announce our latest anniversary last month. Valentine's day has always been considered to be the anniversary for PCRPG. This last one marks TEN YEARS that the server has been online and serving my tweaked version of TribesRPG 5.005. I'd never have thought then that I'd still be doing this. Many things have changed. First of all, I was 14 when I started hosting. Now I'm in my mid-20s. Crazy.
I just wish some times for the motivation to do the sorts of improvements that you guys really deserve. My problem is that I only stay interested in something until I figure out the challenges--I'm a project starter and not so much a finisher. I'm straight-up INTP which I suppose is why I've always been like this; I just didn't know it was normal until recently.
In any case, happy birthday to you, PCRPG. Or perhaps should I say Screw Around RPG. I hope you guys continue to have fun.
Heh. I took some time tonight to redo the news page from scratch. The goal was to closely emulate what existed before. While I was at it, though, I figured now was a good time to implement some features that were planned on eight years ago but never implemented or finished. As a consequence, you can now browse old news using the forward and back buttons at the bottom of each page. Some other small visual changes have been made and the back-end HTML is quite a bit more modern, using DIVs, inline CSS, and such instead of pure HTML.
In any case, everything is back online. Have fun on the server.
The news system is temporarily offline. We had some guy discover a potential for SQL injection on the website. I thought I'd be mad, but really it's just kind of cool to see how it all worked. Coincidentally, a related bug in my automatic page tracker system caused a lot of what he was testing out to be recorded as pages, so that's kind of funny. It was that which led me to know what to look for so quickly.
Interestingly, he had to not only figure out the injection attack was possible but also figure out how my arcanely-structured website works. Pages don't work at all if you don't do a magic dance and chant three prayers (not as a security feature--just due to the site's weird design), so it's pretty impressive that he was able to figure it out. This had nothing to do with a firewall or anything, however, so I'm not sure what the guy was rambling on about in his post.
In any case, it's really Dreamhost's fault. They used to run with magic quotes enabled (which would have prevented this) but seem to have disabled that at some point. I've plugged all the potential holes for this sort of exploit that I could find. I'll replace the news system when I get a chance with a slightly tweaked version instead of just what we had before. I've been meaning to add page numbers for news for nearly a decade now. Here's a good opportunity.
I really loved this image the guy posted, so I'll keep it on here for a while:
Yes, We're Still Alive
I think. It seemed fitting to post something here after a few months of no news. Hosting has been business as usual for quite a while now. Stuff breaks, I fix it, and the world of Keldrin continues for another day.
Not real thrilled with the fast swinging that's going on. Once I find out the method being used I will patch it. After that there will be some tears on the trail of shame for those who decided it isn't cheating to use it. It is.
