River.fysh.org: Difference between revisions

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(→‎History: Move to 'newstream' in August 2015.)
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Between [[river.fysh.org]] and [[stickelback.fysh.org]] we provide a wide range of services, ranging from email and web pages, through hosting of domains to the more esoteric such as [http://www.goteamspeak.com/ TeamSpeak] servers.
Between [[river.fysh.org]] and [[stickelback.fysh.org]] we provide a wide range of services, ranging from email and web pages, through hosting of domains to the more esoteric such as [http://www.goteamspeak.com/ TeamSpeak] servers.
IPv6 connectivity to [[river.fysh.org]] is provided on the hostname river6.fysh.org.  The separate hostname avoids any IPv6-only routing issues causing confusion if a client program silently chooses to use the IPv6 address instead of IPv4.


If you have a problem with, or a query about, any of the services on fysh.org, or would like to request an additional service, please send email to [mailto:root@fysh.org The Fyshy Admin].
If you have a problem with, or a query about, any of the services on fysh.org, or would like to request an additional service, please send email to [mailto:root@fysh.org The Fyshy Admin].

Revision as of 09:17, 3 September 2015

NB: All the information provided here-in about the fysh.org services is made available on a best-effort basis. If you're in in doubt as to if the information provided here is up to date please check the 'last modified' entry at the bottom of, or the History link at the top of, the page.

The Fysh Server Called River

river.fysh.org is currently a KVM-hosted virtual machine running on stream.fysh.org, a server rented from and hosted by OVH. This is paid for via subscriptions charged to the principal users of the machine. Any queries about payments, or obtaining an account, should be directed to Mike Ashton.

The machine generally runs the current Stable version of the Debian distribution of Linux. The majority of the software installed on it is that which is directly supported by Debian, as this makes day-to-day administration and keeping things up to date very easy. We will, however, install software by hand if sufficient need is demonstrated. Our aim is to offer a stable service first and foremost, so don't necessarily expect cutting-edge versions of software.

Note that this is a 64-bit installation, with some 32-bit compatibility libraries. If you're trying to get something to work from source yourself you might encounter problems if it is not 100% 64-bit clean. You can try compiling with the '-m32' flag, but it would be best to get the source fixed.

Between river.fysh.org and stickelback.fysh.org we provide a wide range of services, ranging from email and web pages, through hosting of domains to the more esoteric such as TeamSpeak servers.

IPv6 connectivity to river.fysh.org is provided on the hostname river6.fysh.org. The separate hostname avoids any IPv6-only routing issues causing confusion if a client program silently chooses to use the IPv6 address instead of IPv4.

If you have a problem with, or a query about, any of the services on fysh.org, or would like to request an additional service, please send email to The Fyshy Admin.

Current Supported Services:

Note that the following services are now on separate machines:

History

Initially fysh.org was intended to be primarily for the benefit of certain graduates from The University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science who were just some of the self-proclaimed Fysh. Indeed it was initially hosted, as the server crucigera.fysh.org, in the office of a friendly member of Warwick DCS staff. Since then it's been hosted for free on various DSL lines (even before those were offered publically in the UK) and at the premises of a few companies with which one of the Fyshy Admin had associations at the time before finally settling down as a paid-for dedicated server rented from UK2.net.

bowl.fysh.org took over from crucigera.fysh.org in June 2001 after repeated hardware problems with the latter. The main server kept that name through another hardware change or two, including the move to the rented machine from UK2.net (where the hard disks have had to be moved to fresh hardware at least once).

In November 2007 we suffered a successful hack attack against bowl.fysh.org, and as a result started running services in VMware instances. We renamed the machine itself to tank.fysh.org and brought up an initial four VMware instances: bowl.fysh.org, www.fysh.org, dns.fysh.org and surfers.fysh.org. This rapidly proved to be too much for the hardware to cope with. We put Surfers back on bowl.fysh.org along with DNS (now chrooted) so as to run only two VMware instances. However this was still too much for the machine to cope with and things were further exacerbated when tank.fysh.org developed new hardware problems. This gave us the final push to move to PANIX.

So, starting from 13th March 2008 we been used two Virtual Co-locations with PANIX. The first of these was pond.fysh.org which runs the majority of services. The second was fyn.fysh.org which handles Web Services.

By early 2010 we were encountering some problems with running newer kernels on the PANIX V-Colos so decided to change back to a dedicated machine on which we'd run virtualisation ourselves. This lead to us renting a new machine, reef.fysh.org from Redstation. We then use KVM to run two virtual machines, lake.fysh.org which replaced pond.fysh.org, and guppy.fysh.org which replaced fyn.fysh.org. We migrated to these new machines during the evening of 8th March 2010.

In June 2013 the Fyshy Admins decided that the Redstation server was no longer value for money and decided to move to OVH. This lead to us renting stream.fysh.org. We continued to use KVM to run virtual machines for user-facing services, this time via libvirt. The two VMs are river.fysh.org, which replaced lake.fysh.org, and stickelback.fysh.org, which replaced guppy.fysh.org. This move was completed on 29th June 2013.

In July 2015 it was time to move to better hardware (and away from failing hard disks). So some initial work was done to move all services onto an OVH 'FailOver' IP which can be moved between servers within OVH. Once that was completed a new machine was rented and work carried out in early August 2015 to move to it. This culminated in services all being moved to the new machine on 9th August 2015. As this mostly entailed just copying the exact same VMs over to the new machine, and then switching the FailOver IP to point at it instead, no new machine names resulted from this move.