So the recent outage showed off some of the limitations of our current setup. I’ll be taking the server offline for an estimated four hour maintenance window tomorrow to work on it. If you’re into geeky details, read on.

The current server is two CentOS 7 virtual machines, running inside a bigger server. One runs the database server, the other runs the Minecraft Spigot instance. So far, so good.

Both of these VMs are inside a Dell PowerEdge R610 server with 32 GBs of ram and about half a terrabyte of storage. Still good so far.

The hard drives can be paired for redundancy; putting drives into an array called RAID is standard practice for servers, as it lets you use a bigger pool of storage and can even handle it if one drive dies.

Here’s the lousy part – our current hardware can only support two drives being mirrored, called RAID1. This puts our database server on one RAID1 spot, and the Spigot server on the other one. One of those disks is failing, but the hardware isn’t tell me which one. So I need to pull those disks out and check them, to find the bad one.

Meanwhile, I have a fancy controller that lets us put all the disks together in a big pool called RAID5. This is faster, and lets us have all the servers in the same spot. Nice!

So if I’m going to pull the disks to check for the bad one, I might as well upgrade us to the new RAID5 fanciness.

Anyway, I’ll post more after I’ve done the upgrade. It’s all back-end stuff that shouldn’t affect players, but sometimes people are interested in this stuff. Later skaters!