Archived Uhhh what just happened?

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Formina Sage

Probably still better than you at the stacker
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I'm sure that is the question many of you are asking. Let me quickly and efficiently dispatch the questions surrounding this site's sudden downtime.

Firstly, NO, the site's downtime had nothing to do with corporate. Neither did www.thebreakroom.org. Anyone who thinks so is a fool.

I've already explained why Scram and www.thebreakroom.org disappeared. This site went down because my area suffered a power outage lasting 12 hours on Friday evening, while my UPS is good for an hour and a half of backup power. When the power was restored Saturday morning, my Internet service was still down. I didn't have time to get on the phone with my ISP because I had to go to work. I don't think they had customer service hours on Saturday anyway. When I came home Saturday night, the internet was still down. I did some testing, and everything appeared to be fine on my end. Then today rolled around, and I was starting to grow suspicious. I did some more digging in the hour before I had to leave for work, and found out my router had reset itself due to the loss of power, ergo all my port forwarding settings and PPPoE bridging settings were reset to factory default, thus erasing my presence from the internet and the site as well. So I came home and fixed it up. Everything should be back to normal, access wise.

That said, it is clear that I need to appoint another leader who can communicate with you guys. I did not think the downtime would go on as long as it has, so I didn't think it was necessary to post on that Topix thread I noticed you all flocked to. I will take care of that soon. Once again, anyone who actually thinks Target Corporate has sent a cease and desist for the operation of this site is an idiot. Yes, I'm fully aware my personal information is available using a WHOIS search, and I don't really care. I knew that was the price to pay for a .us domain, but all the other ones were taken and I only felt like paying for an el cheapo TLD.

Anywho, carry on. Yes, if you've put it together, I do actually run this site out of my basement on a spare server. This shall continue on in this fashion until the traffic increases so much that my connection suffers. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
 
Just glad to have the Breakroom back.
There is always the tendency to look to the ones in power when something goes wrong but I always try not to jump to conclusions.
Thanks again for all the work.
It is greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks, Formina. I really appreciate all the extra effort that you put in on re-creating the forum & getting it back up in such a short time.
*hug w/a plate of brownies* :D
 
Glad to see things working out again. Once again FS, thanks for all you have done in keeping our little community going. Let us know how we can help and I'm sure we'll do whatever we can.
 
Say, what nice ISP do you have that lets you run a web server on a residential internet connection? I would have thought you would have a business connection or perhaps T-1 but either of those will have weekend helpdesk hours.
 
Frontier, they're ok for a site like this, but I'm not on a good enough bandwidth tier for any heavier-duty stuff. Even when I'm streaming Netflix/YouTube here, I have to wait a bit for it to buffer. While Frontier allows traffic on port 80, they have port 25 closed so I can't use a mail server to serve up site email from a no-reply@thebreakroom.us or something similar, hence my utilization of Gmail.

I wish I could be running my server back at my Chicago apartment...20 megs down for like 30 bucks a month, it was the best internet experience ever.
 
Fs, thanks for bringing site back up! I knew you could do within time.
Have a few beers today! Handing off a case to you.
Gtc to fs!
Thanks again!
 
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FS, Glad to see things are back to normal. Thanks for the explanation. I however didn't flock to the topix site as I don't have the link. My hard drive crashed over the weekend & I've been busy trying to find all my bookmarks, dling apps, etc. A real pain. :( So I had some problems as well. Thanks for getting it back up so quickly.
 
I only have 1 question...wtf is a server?

I answered my own question..gotta love Google ; )

If you're not familiar with the functions of a server, but have heard the term in passing, you may think of a server as some mystical computer beast that performs amazing tasks and generally is a hands-off system. Before we delve into the inner-workings of a server, let's start by dispelling that "mystical" thing. From a hardware perspective, a server is simply a computer on your network that is configured to share its resources or run applications for the other computers on the network. You may have a server in place to handle file or database sharing between all users on your network, or have a server configured to allow all users to share a printer, rather than having a printer hooked up to each individual computer in your organization.

What makes the term server doubly confusing is that it can refer to both hardware and software. That is, it can be used to describe a specific software package running on a computer or the computer on which that software is running. The type of server and the software you would use depends on the type of network. LANs and WANs for example are going to use file and print servers while the Internet would use Web servers.
 
What kind of peak traffic are you seeing? This site has always been very responsive, I never would have known you were hosting it yourself.
 
You're running this site off your Home Internet Connection?? What kinda box you got this site on ? :D
 
re: peak traffic - the server load is never high. Even with 30 people on the site (which is the max to-date) at a time, caching takes most of the php work out of the equation.

re: server - right now it's on a crappy Dell desktop that just has power and a network connection. 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4, 1GB of ram (lol). Running ubuntu server. I'm a little surprised myself at how well it's handling the site, considering I'm hosting 3 other sites on it as well. However, I did just buy a PowerEdge that I'm going to migrate everything to in a while.
 
I do my hosting out of my townhome using a PowerEdge 4400 (with a backup PowerEdge 2400). I bought two of the 4400s on eBay for $300 including shipping. From them I put together one working machine with plenty of spare parts (two spare processors, a host of extra fans, and a spare SCSI backplane. When you consider that the PowerEdge 4400s were about $5000 back in 2000, with less powerful processors than what I'm using and a lot less hard drive space...this was a steal.

You can get some great deals using eBay if you are patient!
 
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