Lessons from the coal-face

[Bruce]

As many of you know, on Friday our main web-serving machine in Denver lost all it's magic smoke, turned over, and after some brief twitching, died.

The timing wasn't great (is it ever?) but it was the incentive we needed to re-organize a bunch of things and also make a number of small tweaks and improvements.

We've migrated all the sites (there are about 15 distinct sites, with around 40 URL's) to a new RackSpace server. As many of you know we've been experimenting with RackSpace for a while now with the Mirror site (mirror.capesoft.com) and we've been happy so far, so we took the plunge.
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/1220.html

What's interesting is the the old machine ("Pluto") was a fairly powerful, physical server, with oodles of disk and ram and so on, whereas the Rackspace machine is a Virtual-Server, and has limited ram and disk. It will be interesting to see how performance on this platform compares.

The change has lead to some tweaks in NetTalk - especially to the Multi-Host example. While we were running most sites on Pluto on the Multi-Host, we're running only the Multi-Host on the new machine, so there were a couple of cosmetic changes to make usability better.

I've also added some support for SSL to the Multi-Host - NOT that it can support multiple SSL sites, but that it can serve a single SSL site. This allows us to have a consistent mechanism for logging, service registration, management interface and so on. Plus, because it holds the sessions it allows us to work on the DLL, without bringing the site down.

So where is NetTalk 5.16? this was supposed to go out last week, but not surprisingly the web server crash has pushed us back a few days. There should be a release later this week after I've cleared the backlog of bug reports etc.

thanks for your patience, and my apologies for the inconvenience.

Cheers
Bruce