Category Archives: Geograph

Anything to do with the Geograph British Isles website

More Tea Vicar?

Well, the important question of what to name the Geograph servers has been answered.

  • Tea – the load balancer, as everything should start with a nice cup of tea
  • Toast, Scone and Crumpet – web servers, keeping our site sustained!
  • Jam – NAS / database, as toast, scones and crumpets are naught without jam

See, there’s method in it.

While I’m waiting for the new kit to arrive, I’m building some VMWare virtual servers of the new setup, which should help anyone developing for Geograph since it allows them to run an identical setup without needing to know much about Linux configuration, and will also allow us to trial new ideas without messing up the “real” boxes.

The Naming of Servers

I’ve done all the hard work, the servers are specified, they are ordered and now we must wait for delivery. Now is the time for that most important of tasks.

What to call them?

I think it’s a trait of all geeks to want to give their equipment cool or amusing names. At one of my first jobs in Newcastle we named our equipment after our favourite drinking establishments. I remember I had Trillian and Baltic. All of my own gear has Star Wars names. I’m writing this on Geonosis but it will pass through the frozen wastes of Hoth on its way out into the big wide world. My family photo album is on Naboo.

It’s not sad, just human nature, honestly.

Anyway, we’ve got 5 servers for Geograph, and I’m appealling to the happy bunch who inhabit the site forums to come up with the names.

I’m thinking rodent based names will be popular given our insistence the current server is powered entirely by hamsters….

Geograph’s New Hardware – from a Skateboard to an Airbus A380

Finally got all the quotes in for Geograph’s brand spanking new hardware platform and we’re ready to order. It’s all rather exciting.

What Geograph currently runs on…

  • 700MHz Celeron server with 512MB RAM and 70GB hard disc space

…and what it will be running on

  • 3 x application servers with dual 3Ghz Xeon CPUs and 4GB RAM
  • 2TB storage server with dual 3Ghz Xeon CPUs and 4GB RAM
  • single CPU load balancer / cache server
  • full remote IP power switching and KVM for all hosts

It’s hard to compare the two setups, but I’d say the new configuration is around 40-50 times more powerful. It’s like trading up from a skateboard to an Airbus A380.

While this will provide a much needed boost in site performance for our present site contributors, some of that horsepower is needed to ensure we can cope with the increased traffic from educational use.

I’ll write more about the process of configuring the hardware over the next weeks, but for now, that’s enough to whet your appetites!