So young padawan, are you still with us and wish to learn the Jedi ways

With our servers showing their age and the OS/toolchains aging, we needed to upgrade both hardware and software so we could develop our site in the Web 2.0 manner.

A brief description of what is considered a Web 2.0 application

• Clean URLs (ampersands, questions marks, etc. are not needed in the URLs of any “page” on any website)
• Standards based code (CSS, HTML, XHTML etc). This enables machine processing of the website as well as accessibility (although of course accessibility doesn’t come automatically from using standards based code!)
• Syndication using RSS, Atom or any other standard syndication format
• Aggregation using RSS, Atom or any other open standard syndication format
• Clean Interfaces and APIs to get data in and out of the site
• Dynamic
• Easy to update without any technical knowledge of CSS, HTML, etc.

Given our experience with Open Source Software and the fact that nobody experienced with the buzzwords emanating from Redmond was stepping up to the plate, we decided to continue with Linux/PHP

The hardware was relatively easy to decide though it took a few iterations to get things installed. Unless you have been living under a rock, you must have read about the phenomenal performance of the AMD Opteron processor.

In the server space, it’s been dominating the benchmarks and Linux works very well on it. The thoughtful design of the Hypertransport channels and the on-board memory controller help it in server workload which in our case are more i/o bound than CPU. With a 64-bit address space and lot more registers, we think its a great base to bring up our new infrastructure

Our new server on which we want to migrate most of our services from the existing two boxes is an Opteron 140 with 1GB RAM and 2 SATA disks in a RAID-1 configuration. We’ve installed CentOS 4.1 as our distribution. CentOS is a clone of Redhat Enterprise Linux and since RHEL is supported for a long time, this gives us in effect a supported OS which has a vibrant community.