ANNOUNCEMENT UPDATE: New Server Coming

[Ian]

Just an FYI, after 15+ years on this server, I've been in need of moving to a new server for quite a while now. Fortunately, this change is finally going to be happening in the not-too-distant future.

The site itself has been around since late 2000, but we were originally on a shared server, which crashed in 2005 - and that's when I bit the bullet and moved us to our own. However, we've been on the same one over this entire span, with a second one added in 2011 (I think that's when I did it) to split the processing for the forum database. Both are dinosaurs compared to the new one, which should hopefully set us up much better moving forward.

I just want to say thank you to all the people who have donated this year, including some recent donations, which allowed me to be able to do this, and you each made it possible. I’ve been setting those aside for the last year or so and was a little stressed over getting this done, and that allowed me to pull this off. The new one is faster with more storage, but more importantly, it will improve the overall performance here, issues with the search function, etc., and hopefully solve some issues with Cloudflare that is making things extremely slow to load.

There have been some issues behind-the-scenes I've been dealing with from a technical standpoint for several months, which made this something that needed to happen. And given the fact this is an ad-free forum for registered users, along with the fact that the internet is slowly drying up ad-wise between adblockers, etc, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to pull this off when I first started looking into it due to the cost involved.

So, while I won't name them individually, I really want to say thank you to everyone who has helped out this year. I honestly couldn't have done this without you.

The new one came online late last week, so the plan is to hopefully have everything moved within the next few weeks as I go through and clean out some old files, update some things, etc. With the dual configuration I have currently, I have to go through some things and purge out old data, consolidate some things, and just clean a lot of things up.

I'll keep you guys posted, but I also wanted to say thank you to everyone for your support overall here. While this year has been incredibly trying, given some of the things that occurred, it remains something I love doing primarily due to so many of you who have been supportive and helped me push forward.

I truly enjoy our conversations each time any of you shoot me a note, and it's a nice distraction from everyday life. It also allows the geek in me to keep tinkering with various things when I get home as I continue trying to improve this place. And most of the changes have always come from ideas/suggestions you guys have posted.

But I’m excited about this change. It should make things run much smoother moving forward and end some extremely frustrating issues, so I’m definitely looking forward to getting this done.

Again, thank you to all of you, and looking forward to the next 20yrs (God willing) and keeping this crazy ride going. Hopefully the team also makes it a little more fun to follow and be around. One can hope, anyway.

 

[Ghost of Autumn]

Good luck with the migration. I'm a software engineer but continually involved in legacy system migration. IBM mainframe, old Solaris crap, etc.

Hope you have lots of patience and plenty of Tylenol

 

[Ian]

Good luck with the migration. I'm a software engineer but continually involved in legacy system migration. IBM mainframe, old Solaris crap, etc.

Hope you have lots of patience and plenty of Tylenol

Definitely going to be a fair amount of work. Already ran into some small issues that I finally figured out, which helped clear a big hurdle. But I'm hoping to have us moved over the week following the final game of the season.

 

[Ghost of Autumn]

Definitely going to be a fair amount of work. Already ran into some small issues that I finally figured out, which helped clear a big hurdle. But I'm hoping to have us moved over the week following the final game of the season.

I certainly wish you the best, and thank you for all you've done with the site.

I rarely drink, but here's a graph that might help. No joke - our lead engineer would pass around some 12 yr old Scotch when we were stuck on something.

 

[raduray]

Just an FYI, after 15+ years on this server, I've been in need of moving to a new server for quite a while now. Fortunately, this change is finally going to be happening in the not-too-distant future.

The site itself has been around since late 2000, but we were originally on a shared server, which crashed in 2005 - and that's when I bit the bullet and moved us to our own. However, we've been on the same one over this entire span, with a second one added in 2011 (I think that's when I did it) to split the processing for the forum database. Both are dinosaurs compared to the new one, which should hopefully set us up much better moving forward.

I just want to say thank you to all the people who have donated this year, including some recent donations, which allowed me to be able to do this, and you each made it possible. I’ve been setting those aside for the last year or so and was a little stressed over getting this done, and that allowed me to pull this off. The new one is faster with more storage, but more importantly, it will improve the overall performance here, issues with the search function, etc., and hopefully solve some issues with Cloudflare that is making things extremely slow to load.

There have been some issues behind-the-scenes I've been dealing with from a technical standpoint for several months, which made this something that needed to happen. And given the fact this is an ad-free forum for registered users, along with the fact that the internet is slowly drying up ad-wise between adblockers, etc, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to pull this off when I first started looking into it due to the cost involved.

So, while I won't name them individually, I really want to say thank you to everyone who has helped out this year. I honestly couldn't have done this without you.

The new one came online late last week, so the plan is to hopefully have everything moved within the next few weeks as I go through and clean out some old files, update some things, etc. With the dual configuration I have currently, I have to go through some things and purge out old data, consolidate some things, and just clean a lot of things up.

I'll keep you guys posted, but I also wanted to say thank you to everyone for your support overall here. While this year has been incredibly trying, given some of the things that occurred, it remains something I love doing primarily due to so many of you who have been supportive and helped me push forward.

I truly enjoy our conversations each time any of you shoot me a note, and it's a nice distraction from everyday life. It also allows the geek in me to keep tinkering with various things when I get home as I continue trying to improve this place. And most of the changes have always come from ideas/suggestions you guys have posted.

But I’m excited about this change. It should make things run much smoother moving forward and end some extremely frustrating issues, so I’m definitely looking forward to getting this done.

Again, thank you to all of you, and looking forward to the next 20yrs (God willing) and keeping this crazy ride going. Hopefully the team also makes it a little more fun to follow and be around. One can hope, anyway.

Yours is one the greatest online bargains for contributors. This site by far surpasses all the other fan forums I've visited. Thank you for making this community possible.

 

[Bill Lee]

But I’m excited about this change. It should make things run much smoother moving forward and end some extremely frustrating issues, so I’m definitely looking forward to getting this done.

Again, thank you to all of you, and looking forward to the next 20yrs (God willing) and keeping this crazy ride going. Hopefully the team also makes it a little more fun to follow and be around. One can hope, anyway.

I bet your wife is glad the bedroom is quieter now that you only have the one new server in there instead of the two old ones!

 

[farn]

Will it be ready to lodge an AI software that can handle the 2025 draft ?

 

[Scotty]

Well done Ian and thanks for everything you do to keep the site running.

 

[Ian]

I bet your wife is glad the bedroom is quieter now that you only have the one new server in there instead of the two old ones!

They're not on site - they're through the same company that has managed the existing one(s) and set me up with this new upgraded one. LOL, pretty sure my wife would lose her mind if they were here and in the bedroom.

 

[stcjones]

Thanks for everything you do to make this site so awesome Ian….

 

[TomPatriot]

Perfect timing. More exciting than watching some games!

 

[Bill Lee]

They're not on site - they're through the same company that has managed the existing one(s) and set me up with this new upgraded one. LOL, pretty sure my wife would lose her mind if they were here and in the bedroom.

Yeah, it's just my attempt at a joke based on someone I knew that had a server in their bedroom. It was an old-school thing, loud and power hungry. It was a small apartment so there really wasn't anywhere else to put it. He said it kept the bedroom warm! His partner was not enthusiastic about the situation but they were young and in love/lust so they made it work.

 

[DaBruinz]

They're not on site - they're through the same company that has managed the existing one(s) and set me up with this new upgraded one. LOL, pretty sure my wife would lose her mind if they were here and in the bedroom.

They're probably glad they don't have to keep 15 yr old spares around.. LOL

 

[Zuma]

Upgrading from SATA to SSD.

 

[n1997y]

Upgrading from SATA to SSD.

Long as it’s not IDE to SCSI

 

[WhatJustHappened]

Bring back the 8" Floppy!

 

[n1997y]

Bring back the 8" Floppy!

You know the heads on an 8” floppy actually were in contact with the diskette surface? I remember a consulting client having trouble rebooting their process control system from an 8” floppy after a plant shutdown because the media kept having read errors. At the time it was only twenty years old or so…

 

[Bill Lee]

Ian today:

 

[Ian]

You know the heads on an 8” floppy actually were in contact with the diskette surface? I remember a consulting client having trouble rebooting their process control system from an 8” floppy after a plant shutdown because the media kept having read errors. At the time it was only twenty years old or so…

lol, I had a Commodore Vic 20 & later 64 back in the day with a cassette tape drive and I was excited to be that high tech. The floppy drive - when my parents eventually got me that - made me feel like a king.

 

[Bill Lee]

You know the heads on an 8” floppy actually were in contact with the diskette surface? I remember a consulting client having trouble rebooting their process control system from an 8” floppy after a plant shutdown because the media kept having read errors. At the time it was only twenty years old or so…

Circa 1985 I had a job as a software dev at a shop known for being frugal. It was my first job out of college so the low-ish salary didn't bother me, it was more than I ever made before.

On their last project they put hard disks into the developer's computers but at the end of the project everyone realized the product would need a hard disk instead of the intended floppy disk, because the software was taking advantage of the hard disk's speed and size. That meant the product itself was a lot more costly than intended, so lower profits for the company. Management was pissed.

The solution? Don't give the developers hard disks, make them use floppies during development.

Of course that was a HUGE hit to productivity because the floppies were so slow and had such little capacity. Every time I made a code change I had to manually change floppies twice since the dev tools and the run time were too big to fit onto one floppy.

And I personally found the other pitfall, the one you mention: Since the floppy head contacts the floppy, they wear out really fast, especially if you're overwriting data time and time again, instead of just using the floppy to boot the machine.

I found out when the disk WITH MY SOURCE CODE wore out. The operating system (DOS) could no longer find my source files. And of course there was no online backups. I had lost about a week's work.

I had heard about this software called Norton Utilities so I went to the software store (yes we had them back then) and bought a copy. It was able to recover almost all everything.

And, a few days later, all the developers had hard disks!