Andrew Beresford's Blog

Last weekend a number of colleagues and I did some fairly major upheaval of the uSpace setup, most of which should be fairly unnoticeable to our customers with the exception that it will now hopefully be a bit more reliable! There were two main four main components to this work:

1. Upgrade the uSpace software from 4.0.14 to 4.5.5. This brings us up to date with the manufacturers current release, which gives us a number of benefits, including the ability to properly cluster the front end web servers (the servers that people actually connect to when you click on uSpace in MUSE or go to http://uspace.shef.ac.uk/).
2. Enable clustering across a pair of web servers, rather than the single web server we had before. This means if we need to update or restart the webservers, we should be able to minimise the unavailability of the uSpace service.
3. Move the uSpace software from physical to virtual servers running on VMware. This makes it easy for us to scale and manage the service.
4. Move the uSpace binary content (eg, Word Documents) out of the database and into a filesystem. Again, this is a technical measure which makes it easier to manage the service.

The upgrade process had been thoroughly tested before it was started, but like the best laid schemes of mice and men, it went a bit wrong whilst we upgrading the live system. This required a slight alteration to the upgrade process which hadn't been planned. It all worked out OK in the end.

There were a couple of User Interface bugs which slipped through QA unnoticed and these were corrected yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening. There was also a problem with some uploaded documents not appearing correclty in uSpace. Unfortunately, these documents will have to be uploaded again, but I believe the numbers are very small.