There is a good chance I'm going to do some switch-ups on the server this weekend. This will most likely result in some downtime Saturday night eastern time. If you try to visit the forum or website around that time, don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, if you happen to be posting at the exact wrong moment when I take things down, your post will be lost.
When everything comes back up, everything will be awesome. The forum should be faster. The website should be faster. All the software will be updated. Everything will basically just be better in every conceivable way.
In the worst case scenario things should be down for no more than an hour. In the best case, things will be down for just a few minutes. I suggest getting a long video game and playing it around that time. Either that or have yourself an anime marathon. Oh, one more idea, download and listen to one or two GeekNights episodes. The RSS feed and the mp3 hosting will not experience any downtime at all.
Comments
The server that hosts the forum, the website, and some of the old episodes is running very old software. It's got PHP4, MySQL4, and an older Apache2. The company that hosts it has been nice enough to increase the power of the server by 100%. We now have 100% more RAM, CPU, Disk space, etc. This wasn't just for us, they did it for all of their customers. This is good. If they hadn't done this, I probably would have switched hosts by now because we could have gotten something much faster for the same money.
Anyway, I think it's a good idea to update the software on the server to take full advantage of this new hardware. I want to switch the OS from Gentoo to Ubuntu, upgrade to PHP5 and MySQL5, and replace apache2 with lighttpd. I tried to do this Saturday night, but it failed because of some problems with lighttpd. Good thing I was smart, and I just booted the old Gentoo and everything is cool.
I do still want to do this update, because it will make everything much faster. It will also increase the capacity of the server, allowing us to handle more people visiting more often. This should prevent us from crashing and burning in the case of a Digging. Depending on what happens this week, I might try to do the update again this Saturday night the 14th, Eastern Time.
In the meantime, I've found a few ways to make the old Gentoo setup faster. So from here on out, the forums and website are only going to get faster. And remember, even if the site is down, the feed and the episode downloads will still be available.
A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred
Technical information (for support personel):
Error Message
An error occurred while logging your IP address.
Affected Elements
Insert.MakeRead();
The error occurred on or near: Duplicate entry '35-113' for key 1
For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs
Do you really want to go down that road? Do you really want the lethal bullets flying on this forum?
Also, I should point out that if you choose to use the visual editor, there will be no spell checking available to you via the forum. You will either have to go without using a spell checker, or you will have to use spell checking provided by your browser. The newer versions of Firefox have built-in spell checking that works just fine with the visual editor.
Let me know if you have any problems using either editor.