Latest Announcements from the Forums

2009-06-29: Another Vacation!
This time, I'm going to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks: July 17th through August 1st. While I'm gone, Will-san will be keeping an eye on things, though that's really just for emergency stuff. He won't be approving applications or anything like that. ...
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2009-05-06: Vacation!
I'm going on vacation next week, starting Saturday the 9th and coming back the following Saturday. I likely won't have net access for most/all of that time, as I'll be on a cruise in the Carribean. This shouldn't affect anything, as the new server seems rock solid, though applications are going to be delayed further, since I won't have time to get to any of them before I leave. If you have any last minute requests for support or things you need done, get them in within the next day or so. Otherwise, I'll see you all when I get back. ...
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2009-05-04: New Forum Registrations Now Require Approval
Apparently the captcha thing no longer works well enough at preventing spam, so I'm switching the forums to require approval from me on new member registrations. I've not used this before, so if it seems like you're being ignored or not being approved, feel free to email me (admin@...) and ask me to approve things. Make sure to include the forum username/email you used to register.

In the long run, I need to find something better for this, so let me know if you have any ideas on how to keep out the spammers.

EDIT: I'm being kinda biased here, but if you're in Asia/India, Africa, Russia, or Eastern Europe, I probably won't approve your registration unless you specifically email me about it. ...
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2009-04-07: Welcome to the Dog Star
The new server, Sirius, is now online, and is what's serving this page right now. The migration involved about 10 minutes of downtime total, and everything should be up and running normally again. Things should be identical to the old server from a user perspective, save that we've got more cpu and ram. However, I'm sure I probably missed some detail or other in the move, so as always, let me know if you encounter any glitches or problems. ...
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2009-04-05: New Server(s) Coming Soon
UPDATE: DNS changes are happening now... I'm going to do the actual move in an hour or two, so there's more chance of people yelling at me about problems while I'm around to actually fix them tonight, rather than move it tonight and then going to bed. This should be nearly seamless, but as always, there's a chance for glitches. Feel free to bug me with any problems on AIM (SN: Xepher42)

So this is a bit of short notice, but the company I work for offers discounted virtual servers to employees. They recently reopened the offering, and I think I'd be foolish not to take advantage of it... especially in light of the recent experiences I've had with the current hosting company. The good news is that this will be virtual machines, and as such, I can do a nearly-live migration to them, so there should only be an hour or two of downtime while I do the final data sync. Depending on the bandwidth usage, I may need to purchase two of them to handle the load here. If that ends up being the case, it'll mean having a live backup server ready to go in the event of problems. It also means that any/all hardware failures will fall to the host, and won't be an issue that I have to handle by remote. The final advantage is that the virtual machines will actually have more ram and cpu power than the current physical machine. Disk storage will be a bit more limited... still more than twice the current usage, but if xepher.net grows a lot more, I may need to curtail the usage on a few of the more excessive accounts, but that shouldn't affect more than a handful of people.

Anyway, I've already got the new server, codenamed "Sirius", is already set up. I may make the switchover sometime in the next day or two, probably late at night. Most of you shouldn't even notice the change. I'm not canceling the old service just yet, as I want to try things out and see how the Sirius handles the load compared to ...
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