Cactiusers.org

On Friday, February 6, 2009 I will be taking the server down for a short time (30 minutes) to add an external ESata drive (for backup of the VMs) and will be doubling the server's RAM to 16GB. I do not have an exact time as of yet, as I am still waiting for a few of the parts to arrive.

The following week the server will be under planned maintenance for several hours while I migrate the base OS from CentOS to ESXi, which should improve performance on the VMs. The estimated downtime is 2 to 4 hours.

Also, in an effort to improve the security of the servers, I have implemented Layer 7 packet inspection with regex matching on all HTTP traffic coming into the server. Matching one of these rules results in an automatic 24 hour blacklisting of all traffic. These rules are setup to catch bots and other nefarious minded people, but should they happen to block you (false positive) then please feel free to email me. They have been active for ~1 month now and have blocked over 10000 hack attempts since implemented.

I had to delay part of the upgrades because of shipping delays. As of today I have doubled the memory in the server, and successfully installed my external ESata drive. This will allow me to move forward with the ESXi installation and ensure the integrity of the backups.

I am looking at doing the ESXi migration in about a week. So expect a few hours downtime while I accomplish that.

Layer7 :D that must take some CPU cycles?

Not really, my router usually doesn't hit above 10% CPU, its not like I'm running slashdot here.