SurfiOnline

It didn’t take too long for somebody to hassle me after they’d notice SurfiOnline (and other sub domains) were down. The reason? They were being moved to the new MyBB server.

The new MyBB server is exactly the same as the old one, 2.8ghz P4, 80gb HDD with the differences being now 2gb RAM, 500gb extra data transfer per month, Debian being the operating system in use, and $8 cheaper than before. I purchased it at the beginning of the month through a sale LayeredTech had running for double the RAM.

People who are hosted whom I haven’t already spoken to will need to contact me to reset their passwords for FTP/SFTP services.

The only site which is being served off the old server now is the MyBB site – and will be moved by the end of the month.

Since my initial purchase of a dedicated server for MyBB, i’ve purchased a second dedicated server to replace the existing one (a better offer came up with better specs). Yesterday I just moved SurfiOnline and all corresponding subdomains over to the new server.

Setting up a dedicated server totally from scratch to be serving fairly popular websites (Note: This site isn’t one i’m talking about – it’s sure as hell not popular) for the first time has been quite interesting for me. I mean, i’ve had lots of experience with Linux and managing servers but i’ve never really set up a server from the ground up including things like real DNS, MTA’s etc. Like I said, i’ve installed them and everything before but never in a live production environment.

The whole process was fairly easy to do with compilation of Apache/PHP/MySQL/Subversion/Bind/Qmail.. you get the picture. The only thing I had some trouble with was Qmail not wanting to scan emails through SpamAssassin and ClamAV (Spam and Antirvirus protection for Linux). That was sorted but then it left me with one other problem – all mail for SurfiOnline was being rejected for “Sorry, I couldn’t find any host named surfionline.com”. A little research and it turned out it was because I was sending test emails from my old hosting account with ZeonHost which was locally resolving the DNS on their network (which it was still set up on) and not resolving the correct mail server IP. That’s fixed now too.

In terms of server management, i’ve always, however, considered myself to be fairly knowledgeable especially when it involves HTTP servers, PHP, MySQL and server security. All of it being self taught through the internet.

I’m happy to say that the new server, without any optimizations, is performing pretty damn well with MyBB load times as low as 0.03 and 0.05 seconds per page – however that’s on the beta website – more on the beta later. I’m still yet to move the MyBB website and MyBB forums over to the new server as they’ll be done with the release.

I think soon i’ll focus on some short guides here on my setup of this server and how i’ve gone about certain things and the various scripts i’ve created (because Control Panel’s are a waste of server resources and are security issues). We’re talking about simple scripts such as a script which scans all of the Apache VHost’s and runs webalizer for them automatically, bandwidth and usage tracking using iptables for certain ports, tracking the data transfer of certain Vhosts and other crazy little things.