SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  4/23/09; 5:18:15 PM Msg#:  5616 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5615/5617 Reads:  483125

New hardware and software for the SongTrellis site

I'm upgrading the MacMini that handles music editing requests on SongTrellis.

If you use the Excerpt Service, the Chord Grid, Tunetext, or any of the Workscore editing pages (Workscore Composer, Workscore Chord Entry, or Chord Entry By Grid), all of those functions now execute on that Mac Mini. As a result, you should notice that just about any operation you execute on those pages will respond a quarter second to a half second faster.

If I've done my job right, that's really all you should notice about this change. If you find any feature of the site that's not working the way you expect, let me know, and I'll see if it's happening because of the changes I've made to the server setup. I should be able to fix such problems pronto.

I'm also right on the verge (tomorrow, if all goes well) of making a big change to the way SongTrellis is hosted. Ever since I opened the site, the site's server software has run on Dell Power Edge servers that run a Microsoft Small Business operating system.

That new MacMini is powerful enough to do everything the Dell servers did, and will be much less of a hassle to maintain and less costly to run.

Unless I hear of terrible problems, tomorrow I'll make the change that will cause SongTrellis to be entirely hosted on the new MacMini. This means that I'll change the site's configuration so that when a user asks to see a page on songtrellis.com, that request will be directed to IP address 216.168.47.12, the address of the Mac Mini, rather than 216.168.60.220, the IP address of the Dell server.

This configuration change will be noticed by all of the name server computers in the world over a 24 hour period. When the name server that provides your web browser with the IP address for songtrelis.com finally notices this change, your web requests will begin to be handled by the new MacMini server.

Earlier this afternoon, I copied every member Workscore from the Dell server to the Mac Mini. Around 4pm PST, I changed all of the music editing links on the SongTrellis linkbar to use URL's that run on the MacMini server.

If for example, you followed the "Workscore Composer" link, you would find that it now loads a URL that reads as http://216.168.47.12/workscoreComposer2 rather than http://www.songtrellis.com/workscoreComposer2. That way when I change the name service record for the site, there will be no possibility that you'll make edits to your workscore that will be forgotten when all processing shifts over to the MacMini.

24 hours after I make the name service change, I'll change the music editing URLs on the site again so that they all point to www.songtrellis.com.

This whole website migration process should be complete sometime late on Saturday.

If you run across any problems, let me know via email at davidlu at songtrellis.com. You can also call me via Skype. My Skype ID is daveluebbert.

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