Updating the mindat.org development server

Yesterday I found out that BOTH hard disks in my main development server that I keep here at home had reached capacity. The boot drive was at 100% and the data drive was at 94%. A quick trip to an online IT store and replacement drives were ordered for next-day morning delivery.

I thought you might want to see a few photos of what I'm working with here.



In order to replace the drives I had to do two processes - one to copy the data from the old drives to the new drives, and another (which I am starting in the photo above) to resize the partitions on the drives to make use of the extra space.



These drives were replaced with a 960GB OCZ SSD boot disk, and another Seagate 4TB SATA drive for data. The MySQL databases also run off the SSD boot disk.

One thing you might see on the top photo is that there is a plastic shell of an external hard disk case. This is because of the silly situation right now where an external hard disk (with case, power supply, etc) was £18 cheaper than buying the same hard disk as an internal model. Plus, I get to reuse the case to put another old hard disk in to make up an external USB hard disk for backups.



To resize the disk I had to install a live version of Ubuntu linux on a USB memory stick and boot from this. Then I can run the GParted software to resize the disk partitions without losing data. Handy tip - if you want to do the same on your Windows computer then you can use this Ubuntu linux disk to resize and move your partitions also.



Here are the two hard disks fitted in the machine. It needs some dust cleaned out too. This computer sits under my desk and has run 24/7 for the last two and a half years without failure.





Finally, a look at my development servers (for there are three!)

Bottom - the ASUS desktop as shown in the previous photos - my primary mindat.org development machine.

Middle - a new server of similar configuration (but more modern) that I am using to set up and test what may become the next generation of mindat.org code - these changes are too drastic to be able to run them on the same server as my day-to-day development machine.

Top - a mini-server donated by David Barthelmy with the webmineral.com code, database and tools that we'll be using to help integrate the two sites better.

And... just hiding behind the righthand monitor is my Mac Pro - my primary desktop computer. Normally none of the servers are connected to a monitor (only when I'm doing maintenance) and I control everything from my Mac.

I apologise for the not-very-mineral-related article today, but I know some of you will be interested in the behind-the-scenes work here, and I still have a few hours to wait for the operations to finish!