Nearly two months ago, we received notice from Linode (which hosts the servers for SoylentNews) that they would be migrating our servers to a new data center in Dallas, TX. Our systems would gradually be scheduled for migration. We could either accept their scheduled date/time or trigger a manual migration. In theory, this should be a no-worry activity as we have redundancy on almost all of our servers and processes. But in practice, that is not always the case. Rather than take our chances, we were proactive and manually performed migrations as they became possible.
We had a couple hiccups with one server, but with NCommander, TMB, PJ on hand (among others), we were able to get that one straightened out with only limited impact to the site. We also lost access to our IRC server for about 20 minutes when that server was migrated.
So, with that backdrop, I'm pleased to announce that we completed the migration of our last Linode (hydrogen) to the new data center in Dallas this morning! Shoutout to TheMightyBuzzard for tweaking our load balancer to facilitate the migration, and for being on hand had things gone sideways.
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Another year is almost behind us and I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we have accomplished up to this point.
For those who may be new-ish here, SoylentNews went live on 2014-02-17. Since then, we have:
- Reached 244th place in the world with our folding-at-home team.
- Had nearly 780 site subscriptions.
- Had over 2740 articles posted to journals.
- Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts.
- Published over 20,000 stories.
- Received over 24,000 story submissions.
- Had over 403,000 comment moderations.
- Posted over 615,500 comments.
- Had nearly 9,200,000 hits (views) on stories.
All of this was provided with absolutely no advertising by a purely volunteer staff!
Please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who have subscribed and helped to keep the site up and running! We could not have done it without your support.
I must also report that we have just over 100 people who have accessed the site in the past month whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do -- I've let it happen, myself. So, please go to the subscription page to check/renew your subscription. Be aware that the preferred amount is the minimum for the selected duration; feel free to increase the amount (hint hint).
Oh, and I would be remiss in not thanking the staff here for their dedication and perseverance. Linode decided to open a new data center and we had to migrate our servers to the new location. We accomplished this with almost no downtime on the site, and only about a 30-minute hiccup on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server.
Because of performance degradation on our servers when loading highly-commented stories, we rolled out a new comment display system early in the year. It had several issues at the outset, but seems to have settled down quite nicely. We appreciate your patience, and constructive feedback reporting issues as they arose. It helped greatly in stomping out those bugs.
We have a bug-fix update to the site in the works... mostly minor things that are waiting on testing for release. We hope to roll those out in the next couple of weeks.
To all of you who have contributed to the site, in other words: to our community, thank-you! It has been a privilege to serve you this past year and I look forward to continuing to do so in the year to come. --martyb
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Slartibartfast on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:30PM (1 child)
Stuff like that is always dicey -- I mean, sometimes "redundant" seems to mean "fails redundantly." But you guys have been around the block, so I am pleased but unsurprised that it went smoothly.
Time for a frosty one...
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Saturday October 07 2017, @04:36PM
Yes, I'd like another FROTHY PISS too.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:39PM
awesome
(Score: 2) by massa on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
To the useful tools, NCommander, TMB, PJ?
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:16PM
I may be a tool but my usefulness is debatable at times.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:18PM (1 child)
Thank-you for the time you put in, and the trouble you take, to keep this site running in an exemplary fashion.
I appreciate it greatly.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Sunday October 08 2017, @04:14AM
+1
Soylent News is made from the food of plankton!!!
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:19PM
For the record, we were so sure this would go well this morning that we let martyb, our resident breaker of things, push the migration button.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:35PM (1 child)
So, uh, a certain other site is having 20th anniversary parties. SN's servers are in Dallas. Want to throw a party in the DFW area?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 07 2017, @01:38PM
When I first started coding for SN that wouldn't have been a problem. Dallas was 3h away. It's a bit further from TN than OK though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 07 2017, @03:13PM (5 children)
So, I says to myself, "Self, just WTF is a linode? Maybe I need one." So - search time. An American company based in Galloway? Is Galloway American? Oh - yeah - Galloway, New Jersey. Not the old Jersey, but the new one. Hmmm. WTF did the name come from though? Should I look to Old Galloway, in Old Jersey? Hmmmmm . . . That idea isn't so far off target. The Brits inform me that the word is:
Linode
Linode (a portmanteau of the words linux and node) is a privately owned virtual private server provider based in Galloway, New Jersey. ==History== Linode was founded by Christopher Aker, launching in mid 2003. Linode transitioned from UML to Xen virtualization in March 2008 and Linode launched its data backup service in 2009. NodeBalancer, a load-...
Found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode [wikipedia.org]
So, if I want a linode of my own, I'll have to contact the company to lease one? Ohhhh-kay.
I thought maybe I could polish and shine it, and give it to the wife. She likes shiny stuff.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday October 07 2017, @07:52PM
Here you go: https://www.linode.com/pricing [linode.com]
They are actually pretty cool.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday October 08 2017, @04:41AM (3 children)
It's a VPS provider. You rent a virtualized server from them. It's not hard to understand, and there are tons of similar companies.
I'm partial to VPSCheap because I could get a plan where data transfer isn't metered. Also, VPSCheap uses OpenVZ, which is a slightly more efficient system if you only need Linux, since OpenVZ is not really virtualization but sort of more like a chroot on steroids.
I do wish VPSCheap would upgrade their kernel from 2.6.32, though. I mean, really guys.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday October 08 2017, @02:44PM (2 children)
Also, VPSCheap uses OpenVZ, which is a slightly more efficient system if you only need Linux, since OpenVZ is not really virtualization but sort of more like a chroot on steroids.
Sounds like a security nightmare. Is it at least a standard container, or something custom?
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday October 09 2017, @10:16PM (1 child)
Everything related to virtualization is a security nightmare.
I'm not sure, exactly. I know they still need patches to the kernel, but they've been working on getting their patches into the mainline, and also on switching to standard LXC and ditching their own stuff when it makes sense. Some places have even started using standard LXC to do Linux VPSes instead of OpenVZ, but OpenVZ is still more mature at the moment.
More info: https://openvz.org/Main_Page [openvz.org]
(Score: 2) by bryan on Monday October 09 2017, @10:55PM
When I first started using Linode, they were using User Mode Linux [wikipedia.org]. Some years later they migrated to Xen [wikipedia.org]. Their current setup uses KVM [wikipedia.org].
I'm sure they will switch again if a new virtualization technology comes along that offers advantages over their current setup. Maybe something lightweight like OpenVZ/LXC/Docker/etc...