[pete]

We are now finally back on our main server. We have reinstalled the whole server from scratch and have replaced our entire hosting environment with a much more modern system. I will write a bit more about the details about how CFD Online is run below.

The server handles the load very well and we have setup a daily incremental backup schedule to keep our backup server ready to take over in case of problems with our main server.

The reason we have been doing this upgrade and migration between servers is because our internet service provider was attacked by a hacker a few months ago. The hacker did not gain any serious access, but managed to start up IRC flood bots on several servers, including cfd-online.com. These bots were very agressive and managed to crash the entire network for our ISP. We believe that the hosting environment our host uses has a security hole. Since then we have been working hard on migrating to a new hosting platform. Now we are finally close to the end of this mess.

For the people who want to know the technical details about how cfd-online.com is run, here it comes:

Our main server is a dual-CPU HP Proliant DL380G4 with two 3.6Ghz Xeon CPUs, 8GB RAM and a RAID5 disk array with an online spare disk using four 15krpm 74gig SCSI disks. For local backups we also have two mirrored 300gig SCSI disks. It is a 2U rack server hosted in a data-center in Salt Lake City, US. The server is three years old now but it is still working great. As backup server we have a more simple single-CPU Supermicro 1U rack server with two mirrored 3TB Hitatchi 7.2krpm SATA disks on.

Both the main server and the backup server are running Cent OS 5.5. Then both of these hardware nodes are running Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo makes it possible to create virtual containers that act as a virtual computer. The use of virtual containers makes it much more easy to move sites and backup sites. With a click-of-the-mouse we can now just move the entire operating system, hosting environment and all web-site data for cfd-online.com from one hardware server to another. Inside the virtual container that runs the cfd-online.com site we are using Plesk as hosting environment. Plesk is mainly used to handle all the details about how to setup a site (web-server, DNS server, mail-server, ...). If you want to know more about the technical details behind cfd-online.com please feel free to ask.