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Curious, about the tech side...

jice

By jice
in UrbanPlanet Information

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jice Burg

jice

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What is the UP website running on, hardware-wise and software-wise? Is it located in leased rack space in a datacenter or someplace else? Do you perform your own I.T. support? If so, what do you use to administer it remotely?

Just wondering :) Sorry if these questions have been answered somewhere else...

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Neo City

Neo

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What is the UP website running on, hardware-wise and software-wise? Is it located in leased rack space in a datacenter or someplace else? Do you perform your own I.T. support? If so, what do you use to administer it remotely?

Just wondering :) Sorry if these questions have been answered somewhere else...

I won't answer all of your questions in detail due to security reasons, but yes, we lease hardware from a datacenter. Linux is our platform and we have a RAID5 setup with other hardware redundancies as well. We do handle our own IT support but I also have a contract with the datacenter for monitoring, etc. Yes, everything is administered remotely except for the work done at the datacenter itself. We also have a 100Mbit connection to the Internet should your connection be able to support it. :P

We run customized software for the main site and most of the rest of the site such as the forums have been modified as well to offer certain features to our users such as RSS feeds.

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jice Burg

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I won't answer all of your questions in detail due to security reasons, but yes, we lease hardware from a datacenter. Linux is our platform and we have a RAID5 setup with other hardware redundancies as well. We do handle our own IT support but I also have a contract with the datacenter for monitoring, etc. Yes, everything is administered remotely except for the work done at the datacenter itself. We also have a 100Mbit connection to the Internet should your connection be able to support it. :P

We run customized software for the main site and most of the rest of the site such as the forums have been modified as well to offer certain features to our users such as RSS feeds.

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Neo City

Neo

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Cool stuff. Is the whole site running off a single server? When you say you lease hardware.. im assuming you mean the server itself. How does that work in regards to hardware failures... does the datacenter handle the costs and efforts for replacements? We own all our servers at work, with nice long Dell warranties... so I'm curious about the leasing.

I bet that 100Mbit is nice for downloading too :) We have a "burstable to 100Mb" connection in our datacenter at work... but i've never seen it hit that before, lol. Definitely can download at some major fast speeds, though. Have you guys ever came anywhere close to the 100Mb limit?

Yes, currently we run off of one server. Hardware failures are taken care of by the datacenter stat due to the contract support we have with them. Our average upload bandwidth at all times is ~6Mb, we simply have the capacity of going up to 100Mbit when needed but we have yet to get anywhere close to reaching the limit.

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Neo City

Neo

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Slightly off topic question...Do you run this thing full time? Or do you have a "real" job that you do? Seems like this place must take an awful lot of work to run.

Everyone that is on staff here does this voluntarily. No one, not even me, is paid to do this. We all do it because we have a thing for urban issues and believe through this site that we can come together as one and make a real difference in our communities. Membership fees, advertising revenue, etc. all go back to operating this site in terms of leasing the hardware needed, software licenses, upgrades, etc.

This site does indeed take a lot of work to run not only in moderation of the forums but things that are not seen but we have a great staff here that offers up their area of expertise to bring this all together. We're always looking for new talent too! :)

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jice Burg

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Yes, currently we run off of one server. Hardware failures are taken care of by the datacenter stat due to the contract support we have with them. Our average upload bandwidth at all times is ~6Mb, we simply have the capacity of going up to 100Mbit when needed but we have yet to get anywhere close to reaching the limit.
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Neo City

Neo

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6Mb avg seems like a ton! I really don't know about statistics for web servers... but just based on my experience at work, it seems pretty busy. If it's relative at all to the bandwidth used by a Citrix connection, 6Mb avg would probably be the equivalent of about 180 people on avg viewing this site at once :)

You got it! Even here in EST at 8:15AM we have 200 folks browsing the forums. Traffic shown in the active user list is all inclusive for the last 15 minutes so it is fairly accurate. At our busiest times of the day we can see ~350+ online. Our old server (just a couple of months ago) was on a 10Mbit switch so we were limited even though the backbone we are connected to supports 1Gb thus was one of the reasons (upon many) we chose to upgrade as we were nearing our max during peak hours.

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jice Burg

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You got it! Even here in EST at 8:15AM we have 200 folks browsing the forums. Traffic shown in the active user list is all inclusive for the last 15 minutes so it is fairly accurate. At our busiest times of the day we can see ~350+ online. Our old server (just a couple of months ago) was on a 10Mbit switch so we were limited even though the backbone we are connected to supports 1Gb thus was one of the reasons (upon many) we chose to upgrade as we were nearing our max during peak hours.
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Neo City

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Just a question of curiously . Is the software that runs the forums a standard off-the-self package or has it been design by UP staff?

It is a mix of off the shelf software and customizations that either I have made or contracted out to be done. Some of the features such as RSS feeds, etc. are unique to us for this particular forum software package. The actual site (what you see when you go to http://www.urbanplanet.org) is mostly custom software. We are constantly improving the site and making it more unique and customized to our particular needs.

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