The blog has been rather quiet of late. All my fault due to being on vacation for the majority of July!
There will be some more interesting blog posts coming in the next week or so but I though it important to post in recognition of the hard working admins who keep Wahanda running for today is Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day!
Actually that includes the whole tech team including myself so please feel free to buy us beer and biscuits. 
*The picture above is a bunch of plugs created as fallout from another great tradition – the conversion of vendor supplied euro plugs into uk plugs.
Another year done. Most of the team here are winding down in preparation for the holiday break. (Customer services and tech operations will still be around). The last few months have been rather crazy here and I haven’t been as good as I could with keeping the tech blog up to date. We’ve launched so many feature in the last 4 months that I haven’t written about including the Supplier Extranet, Questions and Answers, Widgets and more.
My list of resolutions for January will include to be more communicative.
Meanwhile in honour of International Backup Awareness Day here are some random musings on backup strategy…
Site Backup
Over the weekend I was going back and reviewing our backup strategy for the site as a result of this post from Jeff Atwood. For those that don’t know he lost his blog www.coding-horror.com last week as a result of a drive failure on the host server. The regular backup was backing up to the same drive on the host which was a bit of a FAIL. I’m sure Jeff is beating himself up quite nicely to that’s enough of the poking.
Backup is one of the few things that has the potential to keep me up at night. It suffers form being very uninteresting yet absolutely vital to the company. It’s a bit of a no-win in this respect as if everything is fine then no one notices. If it goes wrong (and by wrong I mean really really really wrong) you will probably lose your job.
Anyway, I had a look and found a couple of holes (I always seem to find some) but decided that overall I’m happy. The key to our production strategy (there is a separate model for office stuff) is to keep all the data we actually care about in one place, the database server. We currently have 9 databases storing everything from emails to financials to images. Having everything in the database means all I have to worry about is making sure that the database server is backed up.
My experience with hardware over the last 15 years has taught me is to trust the adage: DATA IN ONLY PLACE DOESN’T REALLY EXIST. This has lead me to be a little paranoid over potential data-loss so as the following diagram shows we have data in lots of places.
Production Db Backup Flow
- Data spread across RAID 5 Array.
- Nightly raw backup to separate HDD (kept for 2 weeks).
- Nightly compressed backup (from raw) to external HDD (kept for 6 months).
- Weekly transfer of backup to office (with restore to dev/uat to verify).
- Physical burn to DVD for long-term storage.
This of course raises the problem of having sensitive data in lots of places to be managed but that’s another story.
So if you haven’t done it recently use this window before your holiday to BACK UP YOUR DATA!
The last couple of months have been rather crazy here in the Wahanda office. After a number of weeks of supremely hard work by the whole tech team we’ve launched ourselves stateside at us.wahanda.com.
We already have one of the largest listings of wellness venues in the united states and are adding new ones at a rate of knots! The focus is really on community and venue content as we don’t support sales as yet.
Anyway, this post isn’t about that as I still haven’t recovered enough to face the prospect of writing it all up in detail. So in the meantime I thought I’d post some photos of our new (ish) server room here in London.
Problem
As a startup we really try to avoid spending money where possible. However after nearly a year of everything running in a big pile on the floor cooling issues with the development and office servers were prompting some of them to shut themselves down in protest. We needed some sort of rack system.
Pile of Servers
Yes, they were actually on the floor of a cupboard propped up using scraps of wood we found in the street.
Rather than spend £300+ buying ourselves a rack I thought I’d make one. My tendency towards NIH syndrome is well known to those of you that have had the pleasure of my company but I quite like making real things occasionally. You know, things involving metal, wood, splinters, screws etc. As opposed to virtual stuff which you can’t hit people over the head with (not counting metaphorically).
I also know you can get racks second hand on ebay but even then I was looking at £100 for anything half decent plus a lot of hassle getting it from wherever it was to the office (I don’t own a white van).
Building the base
I make quite a lot of things out of wood for home so It was the work of about an hour to cut and screw some 2×2 batons and some sheet mdf into a simple base.
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I then bought 4 2m strips of rack rail from Maplin, plus 4 blanking plates and a rack-mountable power strip. In hindsight the plates probably weren’t necessary and I could have got away with some simpler. They did make it very easy to create the box-frame though, which saved time on construction.
This was then all assembled on site and the rack (albeit a bit wobbly) was in place.
Salim helping with the construction
The base and the rails
Installation
The principle of the rack is that the servers themselves act as the main stabilising component. As such there is no fixed top or sides which makes it nice and easy to get to the machines themselves. To power the whole thing we installed a couple of APC Power Chute UPS units we already had.
The Finished Product
Conclusion
So, no doors for security or inbuilt cooling (i.e. cheap fans) and no fancy glass panel I can watch the flashing lights through but for less than £70 in parts and a few hours work we now have a full 42U rack unit which we can dismantle and take to the next office with very little hassle.