Talk:Why does Castle Paradox's server go down so often?

James Paige: How much disk space and network bandwidth does castleparadox use?

Inferior Minion: Castle Paradox alone does not use very much disk space, but all subdomains are pushing 150GB. I have not tried to calculate CP specific bandwidth, but total Apache bandwidth for all subdomains ranges between 1 and 4 GB a day. CP gets roughly 200 unique visitors daily and roughly 2,500 page views daily. I can try to get better numbers once CP is up and running again.

James Paige: Interesting. That is a lot to be pushing out over your home connection. hamsterrepublic.com, gilgamesh, and motherhamster.org all combined average about 0.3 GB a day.

Inferior Minion: Yeah. My parents actually got sick of the seemingly dial-up speeds that can be exhibited during peak hours and I now have Cable for personal use and DSL for hosting. My personal photo gallery, LomeProductions Videos, and Setu's music contribute heavily to the bandwidth usage....mostly the latter :D. It's especially high when Setu sends out an e-mail regarding a new song upload.

Moogle1: Maybe this is a bit insensitive, but why don't you make Setu get his own webspace if he's leeching that much bandwidth? I know you're pretty lenient in general with webspace but that seems a bit ridiculous.

Inferior Minion: I am over exaggerating a bit on how slow it actually gets. I have also since upgraded CP's DSL speed from 1500/384 to 3000/768. I personally do not use Cox, as I cannot stand having to redirect all my e-mail through smtp.west.cox.net, only to have to switch back to my actual host when I'm out of my house. At times I do notice slower speeds, but nothing unreasonable. My parents have something like 10mbps down, which my dad utilizes to frequently remote desktop back to his office. Even on Cox, lag and connection issues cause timeouts, however they are much less frequent with CP traffic out of the picture. I also frequently use the Cox connection to test server settings, as it allows me to gauge external traffic behavior.

Hosting has exposed me to a plethora of tools, techniques, and practices that I would have never explored otherwise. In the case of Setu's music, I've been exploring streaming servers, such as Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. I don't have a monthly bandwidth quota I need to worry about. So long as CP's downtime continues to be primarily hardware related, I don't see any need to ask him to look elsewhere. To be honest, I'm quite proud to be hosting Setu's wonderful compositions. On a side note, I do monitor CP's uptime on 15 minute intervals.

Inferior Minion: CP's web directory is ~4.5GB with another ~2GB of content in its home directory, most of which is purely configurations and source files for custom apps.

Inferior Minion: Regarding CP's current downtime, we are in the process of transferring one of our phone lines which has caused my DSL to temporarily go down. Hopefully this will be resolved in the next few days. The line switched today, just waiting on Verizon to re-activate the DSL on the new line.

Inferior Minion: For those of you who are curious, the current rain storms blazing through Southern California have been causing power outages in my area. This morning, at roughly 10:30 AM PST, a tree fell across the street taking my neighbor's fence and the power lines with it. CP will be back up once power is restored in my area.

Bob the Hamster: I didn't know you were in Southern California! For some reason I always had the impression you were in Australia somewhere. Yeah, this storm is quite a storm. Good snow conditions. I gotta skip work sometime this week and go to Mountain High >:)

Inferior Minion: Yeah, we actually live pretty close to each other. I live in Santa Barbara and just graduated from UCSB. I spent a year abroad in Australia from 2005-2006 which probably caused the confusion.

Quick update, there is a crew running a new power line right now, so I hope to have electricity in a few hours. Verizon won't be out here until tomorrow, so I may not have DSL. Cox assures me they have already completed their work. I won't know until I can turn on my cable modem, though. Worst case no CP until Monday night, but if Cox is working I'll set up a port redirect like the last time the DSL went down.

Inferior Minion: So it looks like power won't be restored until sometime tomorrow. Not exactly sure why they weren't able to fix it this afternoon, actually. Not much else I can do but wait.

Inferior Minion: Or not. SCE returned much later than I thought they would. CP should be back up and running! :D

Inferior Minion: For those of you wondering, CP experienced a HD failure on Thursday, May 20 2010 which I am currently trying to recover from. The partition tables appear to be corrupt and I am attempting to salvage any and all data off the drives, but this is a slow process that will most likely roll into the weekend since I can't devote as much time as I'd like due to work on Friday. I really hope to have everything sorted out and recovered early this weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Bob the Hamster: Ouch! Poor partition table! :(

Inferior Minion: On the bright side, I'm using this as an excuse to buy a new HD and do a fresh install of the 64bit kernel. Data recover is such a pain, though :(

Inferior Minion: When it rains, it pours, as they say. Not only did I have an HD issue, my DVD drive decided it didn't feel like functioning anymore. As of Sunday, May 23rd 2010, CP is running a fresh install of Fedora 12 x86_64 on a new 1TB HD and a new DVD Drive. The web server is on, but not externally exposed, and the backup files are being copied over to the new drive. Once the files are in place, I should be able to restart apache and we'll see what libraries and dependencies I'm missing. Hopefully that will happen later in the day, but I'm at the mercy of the data transfer speed and dependency hell. Sorry again for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued patience.

Inferior Minion: At 10:00 PM on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010, CP restarted its Apache server and began responding to requests. Not all services previously hosted on CP are configured, but I will be spending the next week or so reinstalling and reconfiguring everything. Please do let me know if you come across any oddities with the new installation and thanks again for your patience.