Moving Servers

[NoSanninWa]

AnimeSuki Forums is going to be moving servers in about 24 hours sometime after 2000 UTC time (http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc). We will be down for a few hours while we move servers.

I'm sure all of our members want to know the answer to one question, "What does this mean to us?" Well... very little actually. Our first change will be to turn back on the "Who is viewing this thread" feature that some of you are missing. We will be ad-free at first, but that is purely temporary until we ensure the forums are running smoothly. Unfortunately the server hosting costs too much for us to afford without advertising, but we are going to have much greater control over exactly which ads you will see on our site. Mostly we hope to be more responsive to the needs of our members.

The biggest delay in changing hosting is for the new DNS to propogate throughout the system so that our url will take you to our new home. To better serve you we are adding a temporary domain name to direct you to our new server while we wait for the DNS to catch up. Once we are down, feel free to check for our return at forums2.animesuki.com (http://forums2.animesuki.com). Right now there is an error message there, but it will be our new home as soon as the move is done.

For many years AnimeSuki Forums have been given free hosting by Mb81 who has been kind enough to provide all the service we could want. I'm sure this will be more of a headache for us than we realize. Especially for GHDpro and NightWish who are our new site adminstrators. Mb81 has constantly added new servers to keep down the load times, fended off many waves of DDoS attacks and fixed anything that got broke. He has done all this for us, but now we are striking out on our own.

Mb81 has our thanks for his years of effort on our behalf and our entire staff hopes that you will offer him your thanks as well.

[Vexx]

Myself, I'll miss his tireless efforts ... but also his unique take on the English language :) (I don't mean that as criticism .... but as I'm learning Japanese and making sentences myself, I can see the smiles on my japanese-speaking victims :) ).

I'll definitely miss the Mb81 technical postings...

[Jinto]

Indeed, thank you very much Mb81.

Oh wait that means, bye bye fast forum connection (new servers are in Texas?).
I really want to know how big the database backup will be (several 100 Mbyte?)

[Daniel E.]

Indeed, thank you very much Mb81.

Same here. :) Thanks for all the effort and hard work. :)

[The-Ghost]

THanks for all the effort and hard work with the AS forums.
Merci

[Mb81]

Myself, I'll miss his tireless efforts ... but also his unique take on the English language :)

That`s a good one. Well, don´t miss me all too much. I still stay on the forum of course.

[monir]

lol.. One for Mb81 and none for Vexx. :heh: Can't blame Vexx either since he hardly ever visits the Naruto section of the forum where Mb81 is a farely regular customer.

[Sai the Dreamer]

I really want to know how big the database backup will be (several 100 Mbyte?)

Put it this way, most posts are probably a few hundred characters... let's say 250 for consistency sake. That means roughly 250 bytes for every post, plus other small details taking up another hundred or so bytes. Times by 850,000, and you'll see a few hundred megabytes already gone on the posts. :p

Also, thank you for your efforts! I've been hovering around here for a good while, and every time I'd drop by, the forums loaded nice and quickly, even while I was on dialup from the other side of the world. :heh: (I'm still here... but with a better connection now!)

[GHDpro]

Oh wait that means, bye bye fast forum connection (new servers are in Texas?).
I really want to know how big the database backup will be (several 100 Mbyte?)

A complete backup is 1.9 gigabyte. That includes both table data and indexes (indexes are what the database uses to quickly find information in the data files). The post table data (without index) is about 500 Mb, PM text is about 50 Mb and custom avatars about 100 Mb.

I should mention that without indexes (including the vBulletin search index tables, which can be rebuild) and the "postparsed" table (which I think vBulletin uses for caching posts) the backup is only about 700 Mb.

And yes, the new servers are in Texas. I noticed the difference myself too, but it's not that bad really.

[Rurik]

My gratitude to Mb81, your help maintaining the forum integrity as to help others inquiries cant be overlook, even if one is not directly affected by the support you gave.

One cant forget the terrible outing the Forum had around a year ago, when an entire Year data was lost, Im glad to know we have people as Mb81, GHDpro and NightWish working day and night to make the Forum less vulnerable and more enjoyable.

Good to know you will still be around :)

[Zu Ra]

Thanx Mb81 for keeping AS running and functioning for all this long . I dont know what I would do with AS , my life would lose its meaning :]

[Aoie_Emesai]

That`s a good one. Well, don´t miss me all too much. I still stay on the forum of course.

That's nice to hear. I've been on this forum for a long time too. I really enjoy chatting with the regulars here ^_^. Me thank you Mb81, even though I say i really don't ever contribute anything here on AnimeSuki.

http://forums2.animesuki.com/ , will this be the new server address or will it stay as animesuki.com?

[NoSanninWa]

It is staying as AnimeSuki.com

The http://forums2.animesuki.com/ address is only being used to tide you over in case there is a problem with the DNS. (When we move servers we have to change the IP address that forums.AnimeSuki.com points to. It takes time before everyone's computer knows the address has changed.)

[The Small One]

So you change from 9 load-balanceds servers to a single one? This one should be pretty powerful. :)

[GHDpro]

So you change from 9 load-balanceds servers to a single one? This one should be pretty powerful. :)

No, we will have 2 servers for the forum (one database server and one webserver). Both have a dual core AMD Opteron CPU and several gigabyte of RAM.

Also to my knowledge the AnimeSuki forum shares those 9 servers you mention with at least one other forum and a pretty big one too: NarotuForums.com (http://www.narutoforums.com/). Or at least this used to be the case, I'm not very familar with the current setup Mb81 uses.

It is posible the new servers will not be entirely up to the task as we had to estimate what kind of hardware would be required (we can't exactly duplicate what Mb81 had setup). But we'll see: if more server power is required we might just move again soon. But I doubt it'll come to that, perhaps only a bit more RAM is needed.

[Mb81]

No, we will have 2 servers for the forum (one database server and one webserver). Both have a dual core AMD Opteron CPU and several gigabyte of RAM.

Also to my knowledge the AnimeSuki forum shares those 9 servers you mention with at least one other forum and a pretty big one too: NarotuForums.com (http://www.narutoforums.com/). Or at least this used to be the case, I'm not very familar with the current setup Mb81 uses.

It is posible the new servers will not be entirely up to the task as we had to estimate what kind of hardware would be required (we can't exactly duplicate what Mb81 had setup). But we'll see: if more server power is required we might just move again soon. But I doubt it'll come to that, perhaps only a bit more RAM is needed.

RAMs are most important. For the speed; we will see. Our setup currently is quite good if there is no unexpected server down. For Uplink; i hope no "Cognet" Traffic. Its just a matter of time until they are gone anyway.

[Daniel E.]

Well, that was pretty quick and painless.

Though, I am now getting old PM pop ups from messages I read days ago. :p

[Deathkillz]

well so far so good ~ i can see my name at the bottom! :) hope for a smooth future :3
Indeed, thank you very much Mb81.
*nods*

[NightWish]

Phew! Now most of the move is done I feel I can relax a little :heh:. Quite a lot of work, even though GHDpro did most of it :p. I'm not sure how Mb81 managed for so long, wow. Many thanks to him for all his support over the years and with the move.

Also, thank you everyone else for your patients during the down time. Hopefully you won't notice any problems, but if you do please post them here or send us an email. The server load looks OK at the moment, but we're going to keep watching it carefully until the weekend has passed. Then we'll re-evaluate the hardware to see if we're starting to crawl or flying like before.

[WanderingKnight]

Thanks a lot for your hard work, it's been working fine for me up until now!

[Vexx]

Also looking a-ok and reacting to queries just fine from geosync satellite hell...

[Radiosity]

Accessing from the uk here and all seems nice and speedy with no problems :) Side note: I also had a pm notification come up from a while back. I sent a pm not that long before the move, so I have to wonder if it might not have made it to its destination...

[NoSanninWa]

All PMs made it to their destinations. We shut down the forum before moving it to ensure that nothing at all was lost.

[Radiosity]

Ah, that's good to know :) Thanks NSW.

[SeijiSensei]

I always thought the reason the servers were in Europe had to do with American intellectual property laws. Now that they're in Texas, looks like I was wrong.

You did talk to an attorney or two before moving into the US, didn't you?

Having moved my share of servers, I congratulate you all for a truly well-managed effort. Other than a little down time, I haven't seen any glitches in the forums or the torrent listings.

Have a Lone Star on me; heck, have a few!

[NoSanninWa]

Thanks for the beer. GHDpro and NightWish collaborated and set up a detailed plan in advance to make sure that nothing was missed. Then they uploaded a backup of the forum to the new server and got it up and running to make sure everything worked. At one point GHDpro managed to accidently lock himself out of the firewall and had to get it reset by support. :heh: This took a good bit of work behind the scenes before we even mentioned the impending move.

Only after we actually had a functional firewall and forum running on the new server did we set a date for the move and make the announcement. Then they shut down the old server, made the final backup, changed DNS and restored the forum on the new server from that final backup. This is why you only noticed that little bit of downtime while the final backup was made, uploaded to the new server and restored.

Wow. When you spell it all out like that, it seems less like an clever magic trick and more like intense thought, sweat, extended effort and determination. Those two really earned those Lone Stars.