The new servers for Geograph arrived this morning, behold the almighty Tower of Power!

The supplier for this lot was World of Computers and they’ve been very helpful in my dealings with them. They were recommended to me and so far they’ve been great. They even deliver the stuff themselves in their own van. I like that. It might cost them a bit more, but they can be sure it’s taken care of in transit and is received by the right person. Nice 🙂

Geograph is a spare time project and I’m on an absolutely monster schedule for the next few weeks to launch a new product, so it could be several weeks before we get these babies racked up. I’ll write more about the architecture of the new setup as I do it…

While pondering the power consumption of the Geograph servers I wondered how tricky it would be go “carbon neutral”. What that means is we’d counterbalance the effect of CO2 emissions from our electricity consumption by planting sufficient trees to mop it up.

Seems appropriate to me!

http://www.carbonneutral.com is a site that allows you do this, and our power consumption would be counterbalanced by planting 3-4 trees a year. The Carbon Neutral folks will do this for £10/tree, which is great, but I’d much rather have something like this done by people connected with the project in some way.

So, let’s say I want to see 5 trees planted before the end of the year – does anyone have any contacts or ideas on how we might get this done?

I had been planning to use Debian Sarge on the new Geograph servers, but the buzz around tomorrow’s new release of Ubuntu is hard to ignore. I’d previously dismissed Ubuntu for server use assuming it was too focussed on the desktop, and while they are doing admirable work in that area, it seems they aren’t slouching when it comes to servers either.

Tomorrow’s release of “Ubuntu 6.06 LTS” includes a Server Edition which will be supported for 5 years, with a “certified” LAMP application stack. The certification is primarily to do with MySQL, which I’ve found to be problematic to build from source in the past, so this sounds good to me!

I’ll give it a whirl when it’s released, but if it delivers a low-maintenance LAMP server supported for 5 years, it will hard to resist using it for Geograph. I’ve no doubt they’ve got a great set of packages for LAMP, but one thing in particularly I’ll be looking at is installation of the packages necessary to support LVS based clustering.