It appears the ETS server is dying. One drive is dead, and another is flaky and if it goes we are down. The server is 5 years old anyway. We are looking at our options. The server not only hosts ETS, it also hosts Knife Rights and all our email as well. Since the beginning this has been provided gratis by Dave Pulver who is no longer really in that business and it is probably time to move on.

I am open to suggestions from those here who know about such stuff, just to add to our options we are considering.

Cost is a key factor. Remember, we've never paid a penny for our hosting or email, there's not much in the miniscule budget we operate on for that.

ETS is on Windows (under UNIX) while Knife Rights is on straight UNIX.

I'll thank everyone who posts suggestions or offers in advance and I'll hand this thread to Dave for consideration along with his own ideas and some from a few other sources.

TIA,

P.S. Simply suggesting we "go to the cloud" is not helpful. <~>

A pretty common strategy these days is to keep the forums free-of-charge but also offer a 'premium membership' with some simple perks to generate extra funding. This setup seems to yield more cash than just appealing to plain generosity. Even cheerful contributors like to get a little something special in return.

I would certainly be happy to join up with that. ETS has been an extremely important asset to me over the years. I'm sure we have plenty of folks here who feel the same way.

The impending demise of the ETS server may be a blessing in disguise, providing an opportunity to streamline and refocus the site, a topic that came up in this thread.

What sort of processing power and storage capacity is needed?

Doug,

Could you provide the technical characteristics of your failing hardware and the software that you are using?

Thanks,

Paul

Afternoon Doug,

The security now podcast (Steve Gibson) advertises squarespace.com for web hosting.

Pricing structure is $20/month for one year with unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Yes/no?

Does it need to reside in any particular location? (non-computer geek speaking)

Not sure. about 3 GB data and such. Waiting for some bandwidth numbers. It's a UNIX box with Windwoes running under it, or something like that, for ETS. KR site is UNIX. Dave is supposed to be putting that info together. We definitely are not going to replace the server with a new one, Dave wants out of the server business, so to speak.

A physical location is not really a concern.

Sorry, forgot to mention that if the existing html code is still viable the worst part of the excercise is in the transfer to the new domain.

Many of the webhosting clients already provide the front end. The building of the website is mostly labour.

Doug,

I've been using - and highly recommend - Pair Networks - a hosting company based in Pittsburgh, PA. As far as I can tell, I've never had downtime, in about 10 years of use. they must have had some downtime, but I never saw it. They are professional, crisp and efficient.

For $30 a month - and I'd be happy to personally sponsor a month of service - you get quite a bit. During the month of September 2011 only, they are offering a 24% discount when prepaying for 12 months on a new Webmaster hosting account. The discount is normally only 8%.They offer a "no setup fee" transfer.

http://www.pair.com/services/web_hosting/webmaster.html

Be forewarned - I've never had a server transition that was smooth, no matter how hard you try.

No one has really asked but could you be more specific about what's ailing the server? If it's just the drive's then why not mirror and replace them?

If the issue is the OS then why not migrate the sites to a Linux platform? Linux and the web-serving software, Apache, are both open source (free) and stable as all hell. The majority of the world's websites run on Linux servers and Apache Tomcat. Linux requires so little from computer resources that even old 486 machines still make serviceable servers.

If the administration of the site is the issue then I think a membership fee, even a voluntary one, would be a great idea. I'm barely more than a troll on these forums and I would easily commit $20 a year to a membership. Offering trinkets or coupons to members on DR or ETS gear would be a great incentive and possible sales engine for ETS.

It sounds like a hardware issue. You specifically mentioned the hard drives. Have you considered replacing the hard drive(s)? Would anyone at location know how to install a new hard drive?

If not, I have an older computer I am not using and I am willing to ship it to you free of charge if you could use it. I checked the requirements for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition and the machine meets those requirements.

Here are the specifications of the computer.

1400MHz Pentium 4, 133MHz FSB
1GB 133MHz SDRAM
120GB ATA hard drive

I could add a second hard drive if you need it. The second hard drive would be smaller.

Jeanette Isabelle

Replacing the hard drives isn't quite so simple. Just getting myself into the high security server farm is a major big deal. The drives are hot swappable, so that should be easy, but Dave definitely doesn't want me screwing with his server stack. He knows me too well. <g>

The good news is that it now appears that Dave has decided we don't need me freaking out, <g> and he'll find time somehow to do it this week and is getting the drives ordered for delivery tomorrow. So, the immediate crisis seems to be resolving itself, thankfully, though we agree we need to find a long term solution.

Dave wants out of the hosting "business" which he sold off years ago. He has supported ETS and KR 100% free for 15 years now. We need to find an affordable and maintainable solution. I think we are done with hosting on "our own" server.

Ah, it sounds like you are using SCSI hard drives. Quite logical, actually. I worked with them too. Mounting and unmounting drives are not difficult in Linux systems.

We live in different states so I would not be able to help.

Jeanette Isabelle

I'll be happy to contribute money for nothing more than,Keeping this Braintrust alive!Coupons/Incentives/etc. not required!Doug,I realize you've never been good at just coming out & asking for funds,So just say when/where/how!

There are a lot of people who regard this site as invaluable and would be happy to help. Tim W.

Let me second Martin: Pair.com is outstanding. I've done business with them for many years.

Let me second him again: server migrations aren't easy.

For less money there's also http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who is an IT professional and willing to donate time to help out.

me too

I'm a contributing member on other forums I frequent; I'd be delighted to do the same here.

I too would be honored to step up and help with a contribution. This site is unique on the WWW.

Doug,

A long time ETS follower here.

After read your post, I sniff on the data transmitted between your server and my PC a bit. What I find that forum "forums.equipped.org" is using the Apache server. Though most likely I can fingerprint the underlay OS from here, but to avoid causing any alarm on the hosting company's IDS as a hacker, I use the information provided by "netcraft.com": The server OS is Linux.

Apparently the forum is using UBB BBS software. According to http://www.ubbcentral.com the basic requirement are PHP 4.3+ and MySQL 4 or 5 ,these two software packages are standard components provided by most hosting companies these days, especially those offer Linux server hosting.

Though the existing server probably is a high-end dedicated server using mirror hard disks that makes it still running even one hard disk already dead. But based on the 3GB data and the concurrent users shown by UBB software, I would said that other IT Pro in here would agree that, with the available server power now, ETS does not need a dedicated server, rent hosting space. from hosting company is enough. Which is much cost effective.

To simply the transit, keep using the UBB software is the best solution, unless some drawbacks on this software has already been noticed. If the current system administrator really have no time for the last help, and none from here can stand up to take up the task of server migration. It looks that UBB authors charge $150 to do the job, so the one time investment probably are the $150 + $139 for another license (probably???), then here is the annual hosting fee which probably $300 - $400 for a year. Now we have two votes to pair.com, so it is a good candidate.

Rising hosting money each year can be considered, the members who contributed can be put into a special member class, such as: honor member. I think a few IT Pro could step in as part of the system administrator group to assist at least the transit period and planing.

email service is bundled with most hosting plans, or it also can be moved to such as paid google mail service for the better spam filtering.

Thanks for all the offers of support and contributions. Dave and I are going to discuss this tonight and will decide what strategy to take and how best to implement it. I'll let you know once we have settled on something and figured out cost and all that.

Again, I sincerely appreciate the offers.

I need to ask, does ETS have a complete and robust backup strategy? Hard drives are cheap. The data they contain (the accumulated knowledge from this website over the years) is worth much much more.

If comprehensive backups are not currently the routine for ETS, I suggest implementing that as the absolute first priority. It tops buying new hardware or moving to other hosting solutions. Especially if "one drive is dead, the other is flakey".

If never have a full backup on hand, the first priority is make a full backup immediately, 3GB of data is easy to handle, just stop the web server and UBB software, so that able to put the MySQL engine off-line, copy the whole database and web documents to off-line media, such as a high speed 8G USB fresh drive, it can be done in less than half hour, in case someone can access to the data center. Of course it would be better to have another copy in different media to avoid become a victim of Murphy's law. It better be done before replace the hard disk, as a new disk putting back into mirror stage, it put a lot of stress to the old hard disk.

The database and web document are most important things inside the hard disk, other thing can be rebuild, but not these information.

We have backups.

A good reminder for me to donate to ETS foundation. Thanks for all the hard work Doug.

The hard drives have been replaced. Dave has a deadline Friday on one project and again next Friday on another, then he'll have some time to seriously look at where we move to and how.

The plan is to move the all the web sites to a hosted UNIX server/cloud.

In the case of ETS, that means we have to change one significant "program" we use, the PLB FAQ is running on a uniquely Windwoes script/program and that will have to be transitioned to new UNIX FAQ software. Anyone here that's technically inclined and cares to offer suggestions on how best to do that with least pain, is welcome to offer a solution.

Thanks much, again, for all the suggestions.

What software is it?

I am not familiar the FAQ software, hopefully others in here may have better suggestions than me.

I have take a look on that FAQ pages, if seems all the questions are listed within one page. It is using "Ocean12 FAQ Manager Pro v1.01" running at another Windows server or A Linux server with asp.net support. A later version of "Ocean12 FAQ Manager Pro" is available for $9.99 now:
http://www.ocean12scripts.com/products/faq/
but it requests access to a Microsoft Access Database, so probably needs a Windows server or at least a Linux server with asp.net support with a Microsoft Access Database back-end for the hosting.

In view of above situation, I came up with 3 alternatives so far.

1. Using other FAQ software which can running under Linux server, a google comes up some freeware:

http://www.phpkode.com/projects/category/php-faq-system/

A few software probably need to short-listed and put into the trial use, and then select the most suitable one to use as the replacement. This probably the cheapest run for long term.

2. Convert the current FAQ into the static web pages, since there are only tens of questions listed, even a non-professional web programmer can easily convert them into some static pages without trouble. The drawback is the updates onward would be a bit more difficult, but still doable by any one who can handle the normal static web pages.

3. Buy a current copy of "Ocean12 FAQ Manager Pro" and hosted it to another Windows Server, this is probably the easiest way for transit, but since another Windows Server hosting is involved, the yearly running cost might be almost double.

Ocean12 FAQ Manager Pro v1.01

Apparently I wasn't clear. Your 1 is the only solution we are interested in.

Probably need to take a good look on the following then:

http://www.phpkode.com/projects/category/php-faq-system/

before yet another batch of candidates come up.

Trial use is probably the only way to select a suitable one. The good news is that seems those listed are free to use or with less restrictions.

Here is another list which included payware, a bit outdated, but certain items look quite promising:

http://www.scriptsbank.com/PHP_Scripts/FAQ_and_Knowledgebase/index.html

Nice, the ocean12 demo on their site gave me


When it did work it didn't look all the special and the ETS FAQ looks pretty simple, almost looks like overkill to have it more than html.

Could use one of the many free/open source wiki programs.

Hi, Doug.

Have you considered shared hosting? One of my largest web clients, an electric cooperative, has used GoDaddy for years (for their website, not for email); it's inexpensive and reliable with no server maintenance headaches. Personally, I prefer HostGator (no affiliation) and their hosting is dirt cheap as well.

For the front end, WordPress has evolved into a powerful (free) content management system -- it's not just for blogs anymore -- and there are all sorts of free or inexpensive plugins (including an FAQ module). WordPress also has something called "multisite" that will enable you to run multiple websites on a single WordPress installation (each site can have its own theme); that, along with WP BuddyPress can power a large social network, if you want:

http://buddypress.org/

Sorry if I've missed the mark on this, have been staring at my monitor all day and my reading comprehension is on the wane this afternoon.

Scott, New Orleans
An ETS lurker since Katrina.

P.S. If you go with a Software as a Service (SaaS), such as squarespace.com, you'll be married to their hosting and proprietary platform -- I've got a client now who is trying to migrate 3 websites from there and it's going to be a pain.

I am not familiar with some features of this program. The other forums I was or currently am a member of, which run on phpBB, one of the options is to have our occupation visible.

Normally being able to know the occupation of a poster is not important. In this forum, where we receive a lot of practical information from each other, it may be helpful to understand where a poster is coming from.

Jeanette Isabelle