Junker.org

FAQ on the new Junker

1. What's going on?
Computer Club is getting a new server, (tentatively) a dual-core Atholon 64 3800+, dual 74GB 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptors and 1GB of RAM.

2. Who is paying for this?
The school.

3. How does this affect me?
We will not be copying over all of Junker's current users and sites; only the ones that are being used. For your user and/or site to be copied over you MUST send an email to mlubin -at- junker.org or your account will not be transferred, check below to make sure you're on the list.

4. What is happening to the old Junker and non-transferred users' data?
The old Junker will be kept running as a secondary server for the Computer Club; old users' data will be retained for at least two years or until the old Junker's hard drives fail, whichever comes first. We will be able to transfer any old users during that time period. The old Junker will be accessable (for ssh connections) as a subdomain of junker.org.

5. How much down-time will this cause?
The new Junker will be completely set up before anything is transferred. When we do transfer the data, there will be a period of time (a few hours) when all activity on Junker will need to be frozen (the websites will still work). After everything is transferred, DNS will be pointed to the new junker and the transition will be done.

6. What should I know about using the new Junker?

• We will be installing FreeBSD 6, so Junker will not be running Linux. While FreeBSD should be able to run most Linux binaries, you may need to recompile any binaries that you use. FreeBSD's slightly different API, and the 64-bit integers may cause problems with some programs that were not written with platform-independence in mind.
• We intend to install all the current utilities that Junker has, but if we forget something, feel free to send an email.
• We will be using PHP 5 with register_globals *disabled*. This means that any legacy PHP scripts that depend on this "feature" will no longer work and may not fail gracefully. We suggest that you look over any scripts that you use and make sure that they will work in PHP 5 and without register_globals. For information on what could break from PHP 4 to PHP 5, see php.net.
• We will also be updating to MySQL 5.0 (from 4.1), which may also cause some issues.

7. Why FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is (in our (Miles's) opinion) more stable than Gentoo and so it is better suited for the role that Junker serves. Hopefully there won't be as many issues when updating the kernel and system software. We also like beastie.

8. What are we going to call both servers?
Um, we don't know yet. Send any suggestions to mlubin -at- junker.org

9. When is this happening?
In the next few weeks.

10. Did you get my email?
Here's the current list of users to be transferred (if your name's not here, send me another email):

• nathan
• cpalmer
• tkh16
• pcowden
• erik
• aturegano
• gcawley
• joel
• graham
• jkammert
• jmalbin
• lkulkin
• eric
• mlubin
• jsherman
• akrell
• bjordan
• bstein
• nickp
• rradez

Real sexy geek stuff:


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