6 Months ago, I created the “sunsolve.espix.org” website running at home on my personal VDSL link; 6 Months later, the website is still evolving.
Where we started
Everything started when SunSolve.sun.com has died. I remember my frustration at that time.. I couldn’t gather any information I needed as fast as before. I couldn’t even download some patches as the MOS website was still buggy for the newly added SUN content.
I then decided to put everything I could found inside a database. A couple of hours later and some lines of PHP, the 5.1 MySQL database was filling with patches and bugs descriptions. Two or three HTML forms and a quick’n’dirty web design later and I was set with my first and personal SunSolve database.
I couldn’t resist to showing this to some colleagues and sysadmin friends, which were all enthusiast about it, Okay, so could it be the same for people out there ? Let’s see…
I’ve then decided to keep the website on my VDSL link and open it to public. I’ve sent two or three e-mail to some mailling-list and waited.
And it all started, 100 visits the first day, 150 the next one, and 200 the day after. It was already incredible.
Upgrade !
Step one
After two weeks of running on my VDSL link, it was time to get real bandwidth and more CPU power. I first created a Virtual machine inside my available pool to hold both the SQL server and the Frontend/processing, which proves to be too much so I’ve ordered a server @ Hetzner.de to hold the MySQL server, which changed to 5.5 in the meantime. All in all, I was ready to take up some load now!
Step two
After having upgraded the hardware and the connectivity, it was time to give WeSunSolve a cleaner design. This was done already two months ago, with the help of NESS, my wife 😉
Issues foreseen
In the future, I can see two problems that will probably popup anytime from now:
Running out of disk space
From the start, WeSunSolve is downloading every patch, every bundle, every readme file and is storing everything inside a database. I also keep archives to be sure I can rebuild the database from scratch if needed. This takes some disk space, as of now, the WeSunSolve repository weight 609 GBytes added to the MySQL database which is 6.2 GBytes plus 42 GBytes for the log files.
I’m currently suffering of a lack of disk space, I’ve got about 20 GBytes left on the pool and need to do with that, or find another solution.
Too much time to load pages
Some page on WeSunSolve are taking huge time to load. I need to find a solution to load pages dynamically, item per item with AJAX or so. This will be the next improvement foreseen on the WebGUI.
How can you help ?
Spread the word!
The most needed thing is to get known by more sysadmins, developers and anyone who can find this website usefull. So if you got a blog, blog it! If you have a website, add a little link to wesunsolve.net! Have colleagues at work that work with Solaris ? Drop them a mail to let them know about it 😉
Hire us 😉
Currently, the guys behind WeSunSolve are actually sysadmins, so if you ever need a remote sysadmin or a Belgium located one, don’t hesitate to contact us! You have a migration project ? You need some advise on patching ? You need to teach something to your sysadmin team ? We can help you on that 😉
Recommend us 😉
If you like WeSunSolve, you can also recommend the owner on Linkedin for example. Just send me an invitation and then add a recommendation on the WeSunSolve job. I’m also on Xing under the same name…
Join us and comment
You can still join us on IRC and have a chat or drop an e-mail to the owner.. It’s always good to receive a quick word saying that what you’ve done is cool. Also you can help us improving WeSunSolve by dropping comments, suggestions and so on. What would you like to see on it ? Which feature is missing for you ? How can it improve your daily work ?
Now
A quick word on what we’re experiencing now:
WeSunSolve.net is currently seeing 2300 Visitors per day on peak days, which is terrific! We’ve always seen the curve going higher and higher since the start. I hope it will go on this way 😉
Thanks to all of you who are daily using the website 😉
