Eskimo North

Server Infrastructure Update

Presently, the majority of our servers are UltraSparc based machines running some flavor of Linux,
either Redhat 6, Aurora, or on some of the older 32 bit machines Redhat 4.2, and Eskimo, the old
shell server, SunOS 4.1.4.

I am working on replacing all the infrastructure with Intel based platforms running CentOS 6.2.
I'm going to attempt to get Qemu to emulate a Sparc-32 bit machine to preserve the legacy apps on
Eskimo and Eskinews. Performance won't be awesome but I'm hopeful a quad-core 3.4 Ghz i7-2600
will do a reasonable job of emulating a 100Mhz dual-CPU 32-bit Sparc box.

The old web server was not SSL equipped and launched PHP via CGI which has security advantages
in that each persons PHP code executes with their user ID so a flaw such as an SQL injection problem
in one persons code doesn't compromise anyone else's website. But such an arrangement is also slow
because the system has to load a php interpreter each time PHP code is executed.

The new server will be SSL enabled, will use fast-cgi which keeps handlers waiting in memory for
PHP for each user that PHP code executes for so it's fast but still secure.

The mail server is going to get moved to a machine with WD 10k velociraptor drives, the fastest
SATA drives available (200MB sustained I/O, 4ms seek) and 32GB of RAM so it can do lots of caching.
That should resolve slow loading of mail, at least from a machine perspective.

The reason for this message is to give everyone a heads up. There will no doubt be some
interruptions and times when things don't work quite as expected, but the upshot is that once it is
done, things should fly and there will be a lot of new capabilities.