In talking to a few people who have not been able to access the website since our move, it appears that Plusnet internet service provider—serving the United Kingdom—has an issue with The Planet’s DNS entries. The Planet, as you may be aware, is home to our two web servers. Since Plusnet users can’t access the website due to malformed or incorrect DNS entries, people have not been able to access the website from that ISP.

Plusnet and The Planet are working on a solution right now, but I have no ETA on when Plusnet people can access the website without using web anonymizers or web proxies that do not suffer this problem.

Please spread word to your friends, so as to let them know we haven’t been taken to the New Caprica detention center. Thanks!

Update: The wiki is back online as of 4:45 PM ET. An auto-failsafe measure  kicked in that wasn’t planned, but functionality is back to normal. See the main Battlestar Wiki Blog for further details.

Battlestar Wiki and the Blog are currently experiencing database problems. Please check back in a little later today for updates.

Update: The Wiki is now back online

The Battlestar Wiki is currently experiencing a database issue and will be back shortly.

It took about an hour, but I got the main portal online and the blog online. We ask that you now switch over to the main blog as we are now ending server status updates since the server is now functioning. Thank you for your patience and your dedication to the site!

Posted to soon. More to follow.

Both servers have been formated and are running. We are awaiting the DNS servers to spread through the net before we can do anything.

Joe’s Update (4/6/07): I am presently uploading the rather frakking huge database to Athena’s server from my laptop, which will take around roughly 14 hours to complete as I write this.

Joe’s Second Update (5:30 P.M. ET on 4/6/07): The database is currently be imported into mysql on the new Athena, and after that the wiki files will be restored to the new Apollo server. Hopefully everything should be up by early morning on Saturday, 4/7.

In reference to my previous blog post, I have decided to purchase only one of the Conroe servers, since our Apache / Squid server would benefit the most from the upgrade.

I’ve also asked for a quote as to how much a gig of ram would cost per month on the new server. I don’t plan on buying it outright, since I have no doubt that we may have to get additional servers (or take advantage of other deals) in the near future, given the present pace of technology.

So, as of right now, the quote I’m given (sans the RAM upgrade) is $159, which includes the upgrade from a 10 Mbps uplink to a 100 Mbps uplink.

Basically, what’s going down is that the Conroe will be our new Apache / Squid server, and will be codenamed Apollo.

The old Apollo (with that pesky 1 gig ram upgrade that we shelled out $250 for) will be renamed Athena, and will be configured to host our database.

And the old Athena will be written out of the show by “Greetings from Earth”… erm, I meant will be no more. (At least until someone else buys it from The Planet.)

So that’s what’s going on.

And then we’ll have some pretty cool stuff coming out after that.

Supplemental: I received this from The Planet’s sales rep: An additional 1 gig of ram will cost an additiona $25 per month, thus the price of the server per month is going to be $185.

Shane’s Appandage: The new server is online. I am currenly configurating it, and awaiting for ThePlanet, to format the old apollo server to rename it to athena. They will be dropping the athena server within a few hours.

Right now, I’ve recently happened upon an offer that the Planet is doing for new servers, basically for just roughly $40 more a month we can have newer servers that feature better processing power (the old servers were Celerons, the new ones are Dual-core Xeons) and larger hard drive space (both servers only had 80 GB SATA drives, the new ones have 250 GBs SATAs).

I’m still working out the pricing and other issues with the sales people at the planet, to see what kind of deal we could be given. (I’m working out whether we can be credited for the 1 GB of RAM we purchased back in January, so that we can apply that towards an additional 1 GB upgrade on the newer servers, should we get them.)

So instead of the total server cost being ~ $260 a month, it would be roughly $300, which isn’t a big increase in price, but a definite increase in performance.

Here are the techincal specs: http://www.theplanet.com/dual-core_xeon_3040_conroe/

I expect to have something later on tonight or, at the latest, sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Update (4/3/07): There is a slight issue with the $250 1 GB of ram we purchased mid-January. Apparently, this is not transferrable and cannot be credited to my account. So there is a small connundrum with upgrading both servers. The best solution, in my view, is to merely upgrade Apollo and transfer the 1 GB stick of RAM to Athena, as both Apollo and Athena are the same machine type. Or, barring that, convert the current Apollo server to the mysql server and rename it Athena, and buy only one Conroe server to replace the old Apollo server.

I’m verifying all the backups right now and the server should be down around 1 PM ET for the format and OS restore.

After that, we will be configuring and testing Apache 2.2, Squid and Webmin, as well as the other services.

Keep an eye out on this blog for details.

The wiki maintenance has been started on the Apollo server. Basically, we have two servers: “Apollo” and “Athena”. Apollo hosts the physical mediawiki program files and images; Athena hosts our database, which Apollo calls out to every time someone needs to look up [[Audrey Landers]], [[Tricia Helfer]] or Hot Dog’s edition of [[Nymph]].

Basically, this is the plan:

1. Saturday, March 31st. Backup of everything. We are backing up both files on Apollo, and the databases on Athena, so we obviously have backups of everything. Since the wiki is “frozen” from editing, it only makes sense to do it now.
2. Sunday, April 1st. (Yes, April Fool’s day. Ironic, isn’t it.) We contact The Planet and tell them that we need a complete format and fresh OS install of RedHat on Apollo, of course they will not install the cPanel application we no longer need. This step depends on The Planet and is effectively out of our hands, but this is a simple process.
3. Sunday, April 1st (earliest). Install and configure most recent versions of Apache 2.2 series, Squid (which is optimized for Apache 2.2 anyway, and it never really works well with Apache 1.3, as we’ve discovered), and all critical applications softwares.
4. Monday, April 2nd through Wednesday, April 4. Debug, test, and move old Apollo backups of Mediawiki, Mediawiki configuration files, and images (and other config files) to Apollo.

Again, Athena won’t be touched or optimized at the server level, although we will optimize the databases themselves. The content won’t be touched.

The wiki should not be up any later than Wednesday, April 4th. That’s our “deadline date”.

Once we’re done with that, we’ll also launch with more cool features, which we will announce later on the Case Orange blog.

So wait we all.