Tag Archives: tomcat

Server Move Completed – NeoSmart Technologies Fully Optimized!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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We’ve been working on moving to a new server all week, and we’ve just finished the transition. Best of all, we’ve switched to the new servers without any downtime in-between. Our new server is a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo and with 3GB of DDR2 RAM – all thanks to the awesome guys and gals at Lunarpages, the best host there is.

A lot of work has gone into this transition in hopes of raising the performance – and more importantly, the reliability – of our server. In the past year (since we first started our hosting with LP), we’ve gone from several million hits a month to dozens of millions, and our old server took quite a hit. To that end, we’ve focused on deploying lightweight and highly-optimized code all around; hopefully there will be no more un-expected downtime… ever.

Our current software setup is very complicated, but hopefully it’ll take us all the way to 0.00 minutes of downtime – that’s our goal! We have multiple application servers and programs running in the background each doing what they best – instead of the traditional have-the-web-server-do-it-all way. At the moment, we currently have a software stack comprising of a tightly-knit mesh of these products:

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DDOS Attacks & Server Updates

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Today, at or around 15:30 GMT, NeoSmart Technologies was victim of a distributed denial of service attack that lasted over two and a half hours. Unfortunately, as a result of the DDOS attack, our server had to be hard-restarted and we encountered some data corruption. All files were recovered with the exception of our MySQL tables for the forum which were completely unusable in the aftermath of the attack; these were restored from the latest backup we had (0200 GMT of June 5th, 2007).

The attack lasted around 3 hours, the recovery process another hour or so. We’re sorry for this downtime and are implementing failsafes that will hopefully protect against data corruption in the future. Luckily, our other data is stored on PostgreSQL (with the exception of this blog, which miraculously survived the ordeal unscathed) which is less prone to data corruption in our experience.

We urge anyone with any information about this attack to come forth, and remind the perpetrators that this is a felony punishable under law.

But at NeoSmart Technologies, we always do try to make the best out of whatever situation we’re in, so we took advantage of the downtime to do some server upgrades we’d been planning for a while:

  • Apache Tomcat (for the Wiki and Bug Tracker) was upgraded to version 6
  • MySQL was upgraded from version 5.1 to version 6.0
  • We upgraded PHP from 5.2.1 to 5.2.3
  • The IIS rewrite module was re-compiled and upgraded
  • Installed an XMPP/Jabber Server
  • Several other script changes

At any rate, hopefully this is like lightning and doesn’t strike the same place twice! We’re still here, and we will be for a very long time to come, God willing of course.

Once more, sorry for the downtime, and to those people who unfortunately had their posts vanished in the forums: our deepest apologies.