Here is a list of thing I'll be doing during the outage:
<ol type='1'>
*Replace mainboard and CPU
I will replace these with a Tyan server board (for stability reasons, who needs onboard sound anyway in a server) and an AMD X2 4400+.
*Install new Operating System
The current OS is Debian Sarge 32bit. The new OS will be Debian Sarge 64bit testing/unstable. Why this one: the stable branch doesn't have support for the dual core X2 and for 64bit (I want to use the 64bit extensions of the CPU (for improved speed)).
*Upgrade all software to the newest versions
Because I do a fresh install of the OS these installs are necessary anyway, but I will take the opportunity to use the new versions of Apache (2), PHP (5) and MySQL (5). The new functions of MySQL5 will be very useful for BOINCstats.
*Restore BOINCstats
When the OS and software is installed I need to restore the BOINCstats DB's and website.
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I made a 'what-to-do-when' script for myself to avoid errors during the upgrade, and following all the steps (without the hardware upgrade) takes me somewhere around 90 minutes. BOINCstats could be back online at 12:00GTM if all goes well.

Even this upgrade will not be sufficient to support the growing number of BOINC users for a very long time. During testing, I quickly found out that harddisk speed is also very important, maybe even more important then CPU speed. Currently there are two harddisks in the server, a SCSI 10000RPM HD with the OS, the website and the DB’s, and a S-ATA harddisk for backups and storing of the downloaded XML files. I think this should be at least two SCSI harddisk in RAID-0. Unfortunately, I simply don’t have the money available to add a second harddisk at this time. I decided to do the CPU upgrade first because the current CPU keeps overheating, causing server lock-ups.

All went relatively well, and Murphy came by only twice, so consider me lucky.

At first there were some problems with website speed, but this seems to be good now.

I will be monitoring the server closely for a few days, but if you spot something out of the ordinary then please let me know.