How’s the Fiber

Well, we have been on fiber for a bit. First in the TDC Datacenter and then due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to move the datacenter for now. Don’t worry, we are still on fiber giving you the best experience.

Once things settle down, we will let you know.

More updates

As we begin moving into the new season of shows, it is time to make changes and updates to ensure the reliability of the server, services and all the processes. To accomplish this, the system will need to be down for a bit on Sunday Aug 29.

If you need to be attached to some type of show, please visit locast.org This site allows you access to stream over the air broadcasts to many devices in your possession, including Apple TV, Roku, mobile devices and computers. There are notifications, but hey, it is free over the air broadcasts without the use of an antenna.

The network team will post status updates when they occur and when the task is complete.

We are back!

It was a long Friday and Saturday to bring the the entire compliment of servers up. Many of you do not know what goes into keeping PLEX running. Not only is there the PLEX server, there are others that monitor for content and others that monitor the system itself and allow the users to make requests. I wish it was a simple quick fix, but with all the content monitoring, it just is not a simple fire it up and go.

The initial cause appears to be that the cache drive that the servers were running on was constantly filling up and preventing servers from running. Due to the location, I was unable to increase the size. To resolve this, I have move the caching for all servers to a fresh set of drives allowing it to grow to its needed size with no limits. Hopefully this will stop the weekly crashing of the machine.

Please email alex@tumpr.com with any concerns.

Well, it is FUBAR!

So, on Friday while trying to get the server from randomly crashing once a week, I did something that absolutely Fuct the server! I am in the process of getting it back online and configured in such a way that hopefully it will stop it’s need to crash.

Time will tell.

Updates under way

Well, the updates are under way! the hard ones have been completed with a couple of system rebuilds. The OS chosen for this operation is AlmaLinux. It is binary compatible with RedHat/CentOS and supported by CloudLinux.

The hardest being the webserver. That machine was on CentOS 7. There is no clear and supported upgrade path from 7 to 8 and obviously, no path from 8 to Alma. That sever was a complete rebuild done with many, many rebuilds as things changed or I messed up or I added stuff that was not needed. What ever it is done.

Additional servers will be migrating soon but the core services were needed to be completed first.

Another round of updates

With Redhat ending how CentOS will be run by the end of 2021, the TDC server administrators are in the process of once again migrating servers to a new OS. We are working it so that the users will have little to any impact to the use of the systems. Some systems will need to have down time, but once again, we are hoping to limit that down time.

Thank you for understanding.

Massive Update complete

All over the past couple of months during this Safer-at-home time where I need to drive into Milwaukee every day, but most are staying home, I have needed to update a few things to keep the data flowing. First, due to the increased demand from the viewers, a speed increase was needed. Now you should all be able to get some decent quality streams. Second, there has been a few more requests even as the number of new shows is dwindling fast. As space was limited on the former server, a new system was needed. Actually, this has been a concern before Covid-19 and there was much research put into how to best accomplish this task.

Well one was decided upon that will allow me to grow the space as it is needed without having to keep buying servers and 4 hard drives. The system chosen was a new 24 external bay, hot swappable server with plenty of CPU power and RAM running unRAID. This new system gives me the ability to add storage when it is needed without the need to create a new fixed sized server. As an example, the server was purchased with 4 8TB drives. The system was setup as 3 storage drives and 1 parity for redundancy giving 24 TB of storage. All of the videos were added to the new server. Once this data was copied, the old drives were moved over, adding 3 8TB for storage and a second parity for additional redundancy, give a total storage of 48TB. I then went through the process of moving all of the music to the new server. Again when it completed, those 4 4TB drives were added to the server, giving a total of 64TB of storage. All this was done with a few screws for the hard drives and a little bit of time to format the drives.

TDC is once again, ready for another year of adding to the collection.

More Changes

The TDC network got some major upgrades in the past couple of days. As you can see, all sites are now redirected to secure sites, ensuring that your privacy and security are maintained. On the company network site, the firewall/router got the biggest update. The previous router, even though it was rated at 1Gbs on the WAN and LAN ports, it seemed to have issues supplying the network with the bandwidth that was purchased. The new router now does. It is providing the network with the entire stream that we are paying the ISP for.

Let the abuse begin!!!

Another Update

Well,

IT has determined that the hardware needed to run the site needed to be updated, so it was. Once again, the understaffed IT department is working overtime to make the updates needed to  ensure the reliability of the site.

Update (2017-03-12 23:00)
The new server with expanded storage has been installed, configured and updated.  We are ready for next few seasons of activities.

Hello world!

We are under construction again!

The last server was having problems keeping up with the demands of the needs of the many photo galleries of the several site we are now hosting.

The site will be updated over the course of the week and hopefully more than meet your expectations.