My Gaming site is down for the forseable future and the future of this forum.

[kato13]

Hardware failure took my gaming site down. So I do not expect it to be back up any time soon.

I am now at the point where I only have one complete backup of the hardware needed for this forum (One additional server and three additional hot swapable drives). That may sound like a lot but as failures have become more frequent (3 drive failures in the past 18 months), my confidence in my ability to keep everything running wanes.

As many of you have noticed I have ceased to have any interest in this forum beyond keeping it running for the people here who I consider my friends. I keep it running because RPGhost treated their guests very shabbily when they decided to end things (by deleting nearly our entire history). I do not want that to happen when I no longer have the capacity to host it. (If it was two years ago I would simply be acquiring new equipment and all of this would be moot, but now that my passion for the game is pretty much gone that makes very little sense).

I do not expect anything serious to happen in the near future but perhaps it is time to start thinking about where the forum goes long term. I do not know the technical expertise or our users nor if any of them have access to free webhosting, but if you do feel you might have something to offer on either of these fronts, PM myself or a moderator.

Whenever the transition occurs my goal is to have ZERO loss of data. I would also probably want approval from all 5 moderators (and perhaps a positive vote among members) before I hand the keys to someone else.

Sorry if this bums anyone out, but know that my primary goal is to keep this group running somewhere long term with out any loss of information. I owe you guys that much.


kato13

[Targan]

That's very sad. Does this mean that your planned giant equipment database for post apocalyptic RPGs is being shelved permanently?

[Legbreaker]

What are the hardware requirements for the site? How much data per month is required? How about ideal speed (we don't really need lightning fast, but don't want to be on a dial up level either)?

I am willing and able to contribute financially towards a hosting solution and happy do do some legwork as well.

[kalos72]

I have hosted a good many sites in my days with the old MMO crowds. I would be willing to help fund or support migration to another server farm if needed.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

I run an AD&D (1e, even) fansite/message board at www.thedelversdungeon.com/forums - if you guys don't mind "sharing a room" I could pick up the hosting.

The traffic increase would be barely noticeable, tbh.

[Legbreaker]

Personally I like the idea of sharing an established forum, as long as the two can be kept relatively distinct - a bit like here with T2K and Morrow Project. The costs can't be too bad and migration should go relatively smoothly (one hopes!)
Who knows, the extra exposure might even bring in a few converts for both sides.

[pmulcahy11b]

Is the forum Antenna set up still functioning?

[kato13]

Thanks everyone for your input.

Antenna's site would not allow us to seemlessly move our current data into it and merging into another forum would potentially be possible but one would need to buy,find or build tools to do so. I make my living doing integrations similar to that, but at the moment I would not hazard a guess on how difficult it would be.

A full migration to a new domain as it is (with me donating my software license) would probably be the least problematic. (And as I have said before people playing a 27 year old game may not be the most accepting of change )

There is now real rush on this so the Mods and I are working carefully to plan the best next steps forward.

[Mohoender]

Hi, sad news. Also, I'm equally down in my interrest for the game (due to lack of time). I'll be happy to try and help on that matter.

Altough, I'm currently managing 2 website, 1 e-commerce site, 1 blog and creating 2-3 more blogs I have little knowledge on forum running (except using it and being a pain of course).

I'll check on this and Kato, I hope you'll find enough strength to keep it running until we find a solution. I have always missed your interventions.

[pmulcahy11b]

Is it going to hurt your equipment if I do a slow PDF pulldown of the forum?

[Legbreaker]

That's probably a good idea, even if it's just so we have a backup of sorts...

[Legbreaker]

Looking for something else completely I stumbled across this: http://www.topbb.com/

TOPBB.COM provides free PHPBB forum hosting.

Your forum will be instantly activated within seconds and you'll be in charge of your very own forum.

We provide unlimited forums and categories, unlimited postings, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth usage, many languages, many templates, instant forum activation, ease of use administration panel, designed with security in mind, 100 % pop-up free, and many more ...

We are very concern about reliablitiy, that's the reason we are using dedicated server in a reliable datacenter.

Thoughts? Comments?

[rcaf_777]

I'm in lets give it a try

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

Looking for something else completely I stumbled across this: http://www.topbb.com/

Thoughts? Comments?

Kato, how easily/effectively will this forum migrate to that one? That's the big question here.

[Legbreaker]

My only concern about that particular one is there doesn't seem to have been any updates to their front page since 2006.
Also, I couldn't find out much info besides what they've got on that page...
Personally that tends to raise a few questions in my mind, but for the life of me I can't think of any reason the believe there might be some kind of scam involved....

[kato13]

Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b

Kato, how easily/effectively will this forum migrate to that one? That's the big question here.

I've looked at few free forums and all the ones I have seen don't let you import an existing forum. Also changing to a different forum engine is time consuming and can lead to odd issues like attachments being broken and such.

I am willing to donate my existing forum license, which I believe has an unlimited time usage, so my expectation is that we will stay on something with a similar engine.

[natehale1971]

I had made this for you Kato. I just hope that whereever the fourm goes too, that they can make use of it.

[ArmySGT.]

What equipment are you using? The tech company I work security for is upgrading stuff.

I have two IBM blade servers sitting in my living room that looks like I will never use.

[kato13]

I was using older rack mounted proliant systems running RAID 1. It turn out that I did not have a hardware issue, but apparently the most recent Debian upgrade forced more of the RAID activity to the hardware and all 5 of them puked, throwing bad drive errors ever more frequently. I have not found the time or desire to dig into the solution to this so we are currently on a very old Compaq.

We have a slowly moving plan for migration to a real ISP (with hardware backups and multiple internet lines), an honestly I will be glad to get it off my hands. Thank you for the offer though.

Once I don't have to take care of this box I may reformat my proliants (Since I have all new drives for them) and put my gaming stuff back up, but again it depends on how motivated I am.