Well, I have gotten the bug, and decided to do some upgrading to our webservers. I just received in a new MySQL server, this time built at icc-usa. For those of you with long memories, you may remember I built the last one... and tore a ligiment in my finger in the process. Not this time! I got it pre-built this time.
I got this model:
http://www.icc-usa.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=0&idproduct=1695
So, we will be going from a 32 bit to 64 bit processor. From a 4-drive RAID 5 IDE array to a six-drive SATA II array. Drives are all hot-swap, and the whole things is 1/2 the originals size.
So, what does this mean to you, the user? Hopefully, just a faster site. But the current server does seem to be a bit buggy- it went down yesterday at 9 AM for 20 minutes or so- I hope this will be a thing of the past. (In fact, when it went down yesterday, I was just happy to know the new server was just hours away fro delivery!)
So, I will need a few days to install the OS, and tweak that out. I will build a custom KERNEL, and test that. If all goes well, I should install it next week.
I expect there will be some down time. I do not know how much. I will do as much as I can w/o taking things down. But I think the switch over will entail me upgrading the MySQL clients on the web servers, and tweaking them a bit. So it could be an hour or more- sorry!
Hopefully, it will be pretty clean.