Servers: More, Faster, Better

This weekend has seen a lot of change in the design of the Mac servers.  I wanted to take a moment to give you a look behind the scenes and show you why this is a big deal.

At the end of the 2010-2011 school year, we were using five "home directory servers."  (Let's just call these "servers" for now.)  Each of these servers had the files, settings, and other items for a group of people on it.  Those groupings were:

• Cairo Elementary
• Durham Elementary
• Middle/High School employees
• MS/HS students with last names M-Z
• MS/HS students with last names A-L

Now, we have a different arrangement using seven servers:

• Employees A-G
• Employees H-O
• Employees P-Z
• Students A-E
• Students F-L
• Students M-R
• Students S-Z

Strange as it sounds, this isn't just about cleaner bookkeeping.

Consider 24 students in Cairo Elementary loging in to their computer lab.  Before, one server had to handle all 24 requests at the same time.  Now four different servers handle a mere six requests each.  Each server has much less work to do, resulting in faster logins.

Now consider  the Middle School and High School.  Every 84 minutes, students log in or out of about 100 desktops and 80 laptops.  That is a lot of work for the two previous servers.  Now its split up across four servers.  Again, faster results.

So what happens in the elementary schools when those MS/HS students log in?  Well, different schools are on slightly different schedules.  So that big spike of activity is not happening when Cairo or Durham Elementary are having a lot of logins or logouts.  So instead of the servers sitting idle for long stretches (during class) and suddenly doing a lot of work (save, print, and logout!), they will now be doing smaller tasks more often.  That means smaller "traffic jams" when an entire lab logs in or out.

In addition, student activity is now separate from teacher and office activity.  So teachers should see fewer slow-downs -- especially in the elementary schools.

You may have also noticed that we now have 7 servers instead of 5.  Again, this spreads out the work among more servers, allowing it to all go faster.

So what happens if a server goes down?  For one thing, fewer people will be effected.  If the server can't be fixed quickly, we can move those people to one of the other servers.  At that point, we'll still be running six servers instead of our previous five.

So, in summary:  More servers, better distribution between them, and faster service.  This is what 2011-2012 will bring us.

Download YouTube Videos

Ever find a YouTube video that you wanted to keep?  When bookmarking it isn't enough, try savetube.com.

SaveTube allows you to extract the video from YouTube, download it, and keep it for the long term.  This protects you from the video disappearing off of YouTube, allows you to load it into iTunes (for syncing to an iPod, iPhone, or iPad), and lets you put it on a flash drive to hand out.

To use it:

1. Find the YouTube video that you want.
2. Select and copy the video's URL (a.k.a. "web address")
3. Go to savetube.com
4. Paste the URL into SaveTube's blank line and click the "Video" button.
5. If the computer asks, let the Java program run.
6. Wait
7. Scroll down the page and download the video as your preferred file type.  MP4 gives the best flexibility, so use that if you don't have a preference.

Extra Tip:  There are a lot of services like SaveTube.  Feel free to search Google for "download youtube" to find others.  Maybe you'll find one that you like better.