New Server Coming Soon

[fesworks]

DMFA donations percentages

[Xepher]

Well, the new server is basically all the donations received over the past 3+ years, plus a small bit out of pocket. The majority of that is, like Fes said, from DMFA. As for the costs of hosting... well, I just chalk it up with the rest of my utility bills. If I can pay 60 bucks for a cell phone, and 50 bucks for broadband, what's another 110 for colo? When you actually budget for something like that, it's not too bad. Odds are you're never so close to border line that 110 bucks would make or break you. Either you've got a fair amount less, in which case you just can't even consider it, or you've got a fair amount more. So far, all it's really meant for me is that I still don't have the Digital Rebel XTi camera I've been drooling over for years. :-)

(Now if I could just sell this house...)

[fesworks]

I still try to help with a monthly $5 on average I think I've been fairly good about it. I figure if I would spend about that much on some other free site (with possibly less freedom/space), I might as well try to spend that here.

[griever]

I need to get my Japanese bank account hooked up to my Paypal account.  I have next to nothing in my home account.  x.x  *adds that to list of things to do this weekend*

[Xepher]

Hey, no worries guys. While I certainly appreciate donations directly from users, the real idea is to get the viewers to start chipping in. They're the ones actually getting the free ride off everything. :-)

Also, when this house sells, I'll have more money... well, not than I know what to do with, but at least more than I've had at one time ever before. So don't worry about me too much.

[griever]

Yeah, I know, but what Fez says makes sense, at least for me.  I actually have a job right now, and a real one, not a part-time one, like all the ones before.  I can, to some extent, afford to chip in.  Who knows how long this will last?  I'm looking at grad school in the future.  Yikes.  If I get accepted anywhere, I'll definitely be looking at a ramen and bologna diet with not much to spare on anything else.

[Xepher]

Just a bit of an update for everyone here. I know things are taking way longer than I'd originally projected, and for that I apologize. Anyway, finally got to spend some good, solid hours working on configuring the mail and DNS servers. I'm switching to a completely new mailserver (courier) and it's taking me a while to even learn what all the options are, much less pick the ones I need, and get them all playing nicely. I have made some good progress though, and the mailserver bit seems to be functional. I can send and recieve email, login with IMAP, and pretty much everything else. There should be a host of new features going with this, including full SSL support on all email, and more comprehensive email options for people with their own domains. You'll now be able to have multiple email boxes (with separate logins/passwords) , mapped to any addresses (on your domain) you want.

On a nerdy-humorous side note, (which most of you won't understand, but that's okay) I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out why in the world the server couldn't talk to itself. That is, I can ping the server from my desktop, and I can ping the desktop from the server, but the server couldn't ping itself. Thought it had something to do with the virtual server context security and such... finally figured out that somewhere along the way, I'd managed to delete the loopback adapter from the default runlevel... meaning the internal network interface was not going. That I didn't realize it a lot sooner is probably one of the stupider things. I guess it's something so low-level, and so 'assumed' that it never occurred to me to check it.

Anyway, things are looking like they're gonna work out well, and once I get everything put together, it's gonna be a lot easier to maintain and organize than the old server. The next task is to integrate spam filtering into courier... Oi! After that, I think I'm just about finished. All that's really left is to rewrite some of the stuff like the account management interface to work with the new system. Then it's just a matter of transferring everyone's accounts and files. I've learned my lesson, and I'm not about to promise a timeframe yet, but I am actually getting somewhere. :-)

Oh, and like I mentioned before, I think I'll be able to switch servers nearly-live, with maybe only an hour or two of downtime. Keep your fingers crossed on that one.

[griever]

*reads it*  *fails*  COOL!  The new email system sounds nice...I stopped using the mail a while ago because of all the spam.

[Xepher]

Yeah, sadly a lot of people just started ignoring it, now the email system is choking, because it's trying to deliver mail to mailboxes that are stuffed with spam. Just opening some of those half gigabyte mailboxes takes a good chunk of system memory. I'm making spam filtering the default on the new system, with some safe values to start with. People can adjust the filtering level, and there's also going to be a rather nifty way to make it learn. Obvious spam will just get dumped in Spam, and deleted after a certain number of days. "Iffy" spam will be put in a "Probable Spam" folder. When people move a message INTO the spam folder, it will learn it as being spam. On the other hand, if they pull a message out Spam or Probable Spam into the inbox or any custom folder, it will learn it has ham (not spam.)

[Databits]

Perhaps if you set up your system to only use mailboxes for people who actually need them too on the new server?

[fesworks]

Well, I TRIED to have my spam be redirected to the folder named "SPAMMY" but it didn't. So I just told it to delete right away and set my spam filter to 1

[dragyn]

Yeah, I'm same as Fes, there.  I tried, and it would just revert to a blank, so I just told it to delete it outright.  Not like it'll block what you send, right?

[Xepher]

Data, yeah, I realize now that doing "catch all" emails just resulted in people getting more spam. The new system will only set up additional emails if people choose them. Likewise, I'll have an option to disable email entirely.

[Xepher]

Hmm... the forwarding really does work. Maybe I made the controls on that web page too confusing, as there's several that have to be set for the spam to actually get filtered to a folder. I'll make sure and double check things on the new system.

Dragyn: Yes, there's a whitelist for my admin address, it should bypass any spam filtering.

[dragyn]

I kinda' figured.  Best to make sure, though.