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If all goes well, NAO's server will be treated with a major hardware and software upgrade this Saturday. This will make it ready for NAO:NG and a bunch of other performance-hungry projects. Of course this means that
NAO will occasionally be down this Saturday from approx. 12:00 to 16:00 GMT.
(That's 8am-12pm for most USAians, 14:00-18:00 for most Europeans, and 22:00-02:00 for the Aussies.)

The server is my area of responsibility and it's a planned outage, so please don't send mails to Jaz telling NAO is down and asking what's wrong like last time. :-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

This post was edited by null on Aug 04, 2005.

NAO will occasionally be down this Saturday from approx. 12:00 to 16:00 GMT.
(That's 8am-12pm for most USAians, 14:00-18:00 for most Europeans, and 22:00-02:00 for the Aussies.)

No, oh my god - NOOOOO!
What will I do with all the free time then! 8-o
That cannot - that MUST NOT be!

cu, w0lf.

Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign for a diseased mind!

That cannot - that MUST NOT be!

You could try making little "typing" motions with your hands. Works for me when I'm forced offline for a longer period of time :-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

software upgrade

New version of FreeBSD? Linux? We wanna know... Is NG still written in Perl or did Jaz use JSP/Servlets this time?

New Version of FreeBSD, more disk space, and RAID for that extra bit of speed when dealing with multi-GB databases or large MPEG files. And of course the whole software collection (Apache, perl, PHP, ruby, samba, ...) will be updated.

Is NG still written in Perl or did Jaz use JSP/Servlets this time?

For all I know, Jaz is very fond of (ruby on) rails. What the end product will look like remains to be seen.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

Are you serious? NG is done in Rails? I find that truly amazing considering the amount of love Jaz has for Perl and the fact that Rails has just jumped on the scene with only a year of development under it's belt. On the other hand Rails does look like it's going to turn into a really cool productive and stable framework. I'm excited to see what happens with it!

On the other hand the server is sounding extremely cool. Which version of FreeBSD are you going to be running? I'm getting ready to buy a new server and replace my aging celeron 566. I still haven't choosen what linux distribution I want to run on it but I am leaning towards Ubuntu at the moment. It remains to be seen.

I find that truly amazing considering the amount of love Jaz has for Perl and the fact that Rails has just jumped on the scene with only a year of development under it's belt.

Actually I haven't written a line of Perl for a very long time. I began playing with Ruby on Rails about a year ago, when it was like beta 0.00001 and buggy as shit. From October 2004 to May this year or so we had a semi-private movie recommendation database running here on Netalive, just to see if Rails was mature enough to do a real site.

Since last year Rails has grown into a rather mature framework IMHO. Unless I had to do something brutally complex, I wouldn't want to use anything else for web application development.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

I began playing with Ruby on Rails about a year ago, when it was like beta 0.00001 and buggy as shit.

I noticed it about the time all the hype was surrounding it, sometime last year. I never really gave it much thought, too busy with other stuff. I stumbled on it again this year and started playing around with 0.12.1 then started playing around with just Ruby in general to learn it better. Now I'm about to start messing with it again and hopefully generate enough of an attention span to do something with it. I've been meaning and meaning to get my church's website into the 21st century with some type of content management system but just cannot get myself in gear to start, continue and finish. So many times I get started, go off on tangents and then life has a way of butting in and causing me to get distracted to the point that I cannot finish what I started. One of these days I hope that I'll actually be able to finish something that I've wanted to do. =)

Enough of my ranting... Good luck with the new server and I look forward to seeing the cool things you have come up with on Rails. It's going to be a real treat to see what NG is all about.

If you can read this, NAO is alive and kicking in its new home. Hooray for me ;-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

This post was edited by null on Aug 06, 2005.

On another note. Null, how fast was your old box and how much memory did it have? I'm curious because it seemed to handle the traffic ok. I'm just trying to get a benchmark. My current server is a 566mhz Celeron with 256 ram with 2 websites that get minimal hits. There is nothing like a message board or a blog there as yet. I'll be upgrading to a faster box when I get everything planned out. I'd like to get a feel for the specs NAO was working with in the past.

Null, how fast was your old box and how much memory did it have?

The old box (which happens to also be the new box) is an Athlon 2400+ with 512 Megs of RAM. The usual CPU load average is <1%, so I figured an upgrade isn't imperative. :-) Today's hardware changes only brought a 400GB RAID0 array for more space & increased speed for a couple of large databases. Besides NAO, the machine hosts a few other internet projects and is also used as a file server and to encode MPEG videos.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

Since we have established that the new NAO is going to be a Ruby on Rails app what server are you using? Are you still using Apache + FastCGI or Lighttpd + FastCGI? Just curious, I converted my Apache setup last night to Lighttpd and I find it much more responsive considering how minimal my server specs are.

Are you still using Apache

Yes... mainly because every other project on the same server is non-ruby and relies on Apache. And since processing power isn't an issue as far as it concerns the web server...

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

This post was edited by null on Sep 03, 2005.

non-ruby and relies on Apache

I didn't make it very clear did I. Lighttpd can do all of the normal crap webservers can do as well. Perl, PHP, etc..

How does your other apps depend exclusively on Apache? What exactly do they do?

How does your other apps depend exclusively on Apache? What exactly do they do?

Oh, they might also run on another server - they rely mostly on standard stuff, like mpd_php, mod_rewrite and the like (and of course I use mod_gzip).
But since I'm very happy with Apache, I just don't see why I should abandon it in favour of something else that I don't know.

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

I just don't see why I should abandon it in favour of something else that I don't know.

Yeah no worries. But lighttpd has all those extensions as well.

But lighttpd has all those extensions as well.

Figured as much. But I really dig Apache, and you know - never change a running system :-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

never change a running system

aren't you contradicting yourself here? You did already change the server. Haha...

Apache 1 or 2?

you didn't mention if you installed FastCGI for better Ruby/Rails support.

You did already change the server. Haha...

Yes, I did... I wanted/needed all those cool FreeBSD 5.x toys like atacontrol, UFS2 (with ACLs!) and the such. And what better time for an OS upgrade than when you have to throw out the old system HDD anyway?

Apache 1 or 2?

1.3.x with mod_perl, mod_php, mod_fastcgi and a bunch of other stuff.

you didn't mention if you installed FastCGI for better Ruby/Rails support.

You didn't ask :-)

"*sigh* Some men are really hard to manipulate!" - Orchid

Reference to Apache+FastCGI here -> # 38633

Sounds good. Yep I asked, I thought I did. Anyway, I can't wait to see this.

Hey Jaz what editor are you using to do your Rails coding?

Hey Jaz what editor are you using to do your Rails coding?

I like TextPad because it's so fast even with a million large files open. I tried the RTDs for Eclipse some time ago, but found it lacking at the time (new versions have been released since).

It saddens me that languages like Ruby are unlikely to ever receive the IDE treatment that Java has.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

It saddens me that languages like Ruby are unlikely to ever receive the IDE treatment that Java has.

Well at least on one platform Ruby has a very strong presence. That is on the Mac with the Textmate editor, which seems to be the best editor for Ruby and Rails development. That editor makes me so jealous.

Jedit works pretty good and has some decent Ruby support. I'm writing my own abbreviation rules for faster code completion when I'm playing with Rails.