Long update

So, it's been a long time since I last posted about what is and has been going on in FreeSide. There been quite a lot happening so I'm goning to split this into sections.

Donations: Over the last 6 months we have recieved a lot of donations from various people that I feel are worth mentioning.

  • HUCS (Hull University Computer Society). HUCS have donated 3 old DCS machines that have now gone into production as our MySQL cluster. They also donated a Compaq Proliant 5500 rackmount server and RAID crate being scraped by HIVE (Hull Immersive Visualization Environment).
  • Real Aid(Beverley). Donated a car full of various items including printer and scanners, some old computer equipment which is always interesting to have a look at as well as various other bits of kit.
  • Borandi. Over the summer Borandi donated a lot of machines (so many that I still havnt tested them all). Included were a couple of old machine people will recognise as a Commodore and Spectrum.
  • Universityof Hull: Dept. of Computer Science. We have been donated various items from the DCS, most notably the 5 SGI Indy boxes that are currently being tested.
  • Rob/Sense Internet(Leeds). Most recently we were donated a rackmount Dell PowerEdge 4400.

Many thanks to the above and everybody else who has donated.

Systems:Thanks to the massive influx of available hardware, I have replaced nearly all of the failing hardware from the servers. All servers have been hooked up to UPSs so power failures should not be a problem. I have added the MySQL cluster, a cluster of 4 machines to store all user databases with no worrys of losing date. Finally, we are setting up a mirror for the Debian, Ubuntu and as many others as we can provide space for. This is a very brief summary of what has been done and there is still more coming inthe near future.

More to come in the near future.

Posted By phoenix on 10/12/07, 19:58 | Comments : 0
Website Update
Over the last year, the idea of a new CMS for the FreeSide website has been on the cards but never really got off the ground. This project was code named FireStorm and was supposed to be ready for the new site design you see today. Instead of the CMS being designed from FreeSide I have now started development on FireStorm for my own personal site. Once complete, this site as well as the Hull University Computer Society will be moved over to use it.

As stated, it is currently still in development, but feel free to check out the progress at Phoenix-Rebirth.com.

Please feel free to voice your opinions by sending an email to admins -at- freeside.co.uk.

Thanks.
Posted By phoenix on 30/05/07, 23:49 | Comments : 0
Fixed.
Earlier on the FreeSide admins finally got round to fixing a few of the issues that were caused by the "Great FreeSide Crash of '07".

Fixes include:

Aside from these fixes, Jonty brought up a new webcam from London which we were going to set up as another point of view for FreeSide, however, there wasn't enough time...and I went and bought the wrong cable for it.

Final update. The ComSoc gaming server seems to be running well with both Counterstrike Source and Call of Duty 2 being confirmed as online. This server however needs a lot more testing, both load wise as well as security.
Posted By phoenix on 30/04/07, 00:26 | Comments : 0
Gaming Server
We finally , and maybe only for the time being have a pilot gaming server up and running. The server itself actually belongs to HUCS(Hull University Computer Society), however, if this pilot scheme goes well then the server will be kept and hosted at FreeSide when not in use at LANs.

A thanks to the HUCS executives for giving us this chance, the end result will hopefully help us all.
Posted By phoenix on 28/04/07, 11:24 | Comments : 0
It's Backup Time!
It has been a long time coming, but we have finally got round to dealing with setting up some much needed backup systems.

So, the new NFS server (Mnemosyne) has been installed and has been deployed with S-ATA RAID 1 (mirrored) drives. The old NFS (stegodon) will be used to create weekly (although we hope one day to make it daily) dumps of users home and www directories for extra data redundency.

Enjoy.
Posted By phoenix on 26/04/07, 15:09 | Comments : 0
Downtime and Upgrades
Unfortunately, very early on yesterday morning while I was away. As such all websites were down for the majority of the day.

As is the norm with FreeSide, with every problem the network and our services get better.

This time around we have totally removed the Alice webserver which had some motherboard troubles with three new servers. Two of these servers are twin webservers (Apollo and Artemis) and the third is a HTTP load balancer (Switchblade) and will share the HTTP traffic between the twins but if one happens to die then the other will pick up the slack till its resolved.
Posted By phoenix on 30/03/07, 15:45 | Comments : 0
Wiki Up!
The new revamped FreeSide wiki is now available to all FreeSide users.

Check it out at http://wiki.freeside.co.uk or use new link located in the menu.

Cheers.
Posted By phoenix on 01/03/07, 17:28 | Comments : 0
New Alice
Alice, the FreeSide webserver, which over the last few months has served us extremyly well has now been switched with a new alice. This new alice is running on exactly the same hardware as before the changes are with the OS.

The new Alice has a lot less redundent programs and running processes which should increase the performance of the server somewhat. There are however, a couple of extra mods the main example being mod_mono. This should allow the Apache server to cope with ASP.NET web applications. This still needs fully tested to make sure itwill work but its there to use.

If there are any issues with the new server please e-mail me at admins-at-freeside.co.uk.

Thanks.
Posted By phoenix on 07/02/07, 23:44 | Comments : 0
A Flashy New Start
Welcome to the new FreeSide website which has been generally acknowledged to be a much nicer design.

This is the first implementation of the FireStorm Blog system. I am currently working on the CMS for the system after which it will be open for testing by some alpha testers. For more information watch this space.
Posted By phoenix on 27/01/06, 16:58 | Comments : 0