New servers: Latona, Apollo, and Diana
After months of work and preparation, our three new servers are ready to use - and hosted on campus!
History
Over 9 months ago, we found an old HackSoc server sitting powered off in the department, and decided to restore it and bring it back online. It took a new motherboard, power supply, and complement of hard drives, but we got it working!
Around the same time, our friends at Bytemark were getting rid of some of their old servers, so we went down and bagged a couple. We ended up with a 16GB and a 32GB server, each with AMD quad-core CPUs. These took much less work to get ready to go.
As to where these servers would live, the IT Services agreed to have them colocated in the University Data Center on East campus. Fast forward to today, and all three are happily up, running, and ready for use.
Our new servers
First up is Latona. Loaded with 4TB of drives in a RAID 6 array, it will be a storage server for the society. Members can get a 50GB share on the server included with their membership - check the README for details!
Apollo and Diana are our ex-Bytemark servers, and while members
won't have accounts directly, they'll be used to host various services
that members can use. One of those services which we're also launching
today is TheLounge, a web-based IRC client with some familiar
features if you've used Slack or Discord. Coupled with our IRC bouncer
on Runciman, this is a great way to keep up with society chat on
#hacksoc, or check in with people over on #cs-york. Ask your
infrastructure officer or email hack@yusu.org
for a free account.
Names
Latona, Apollo, Diana are temporary names - we'd love to get your ideas for what these servers should be called long-term! If you want to suggest a name, submit them on this Google form
Thanks and acknowledgements
We're really excited to finally announce these servers, and it couldn't have happened without the help of Bytemark, CS Hardware and Software Support, and IT Services.