I apologize for the server and forum problems we've been having of late. Looks like we're going to have to bite the bullet and get a new (used) server. After 8+ years (and it was used to begin with) and a couple upgrades I guess I cannot complain that the current one is giving up the ghost--other than the timing <~>. On the odd chance that someone here has something appropriate laying around, or a source other than Ebay, it has to be Rack Mount , preferably 4U or smaller, and it has to be very economical (that means really cheap!). Doesn't have to be too fancy, but a P-III 600 or better CPU, at least 512 MB RAM and at least an 18- 20GB hard drive, preferably a RAID array of at least three drives, so we have improved reliability.

At best, this will probably take a week or so to do, so please bear with us as I'm sure we'll have a few more outages. Thanks for your understanding and support.

Hi Doug,

I run multiple servers for myself and the company I work for. I have free space and bandwidth on my Dual Xeon 2.8ghz / 2gb ECC RAM / 73gb SCSI drive server that I`m sure could work for the forums or site. The server is on a 100mbit connection to a multi-homed network, and is monitored. If you want to discuss please feel free to PM me and we can talk there or on the phone.

-Todd

Doug, I suggest renting server space at someplace like serverbeach.com. Three hard drives in the same box is overkill. Any event that takes out two drives will take out all three. Better to use one or two drives and replicate the data to a geographically remote server if you're that worried about backup. But really, if it's just forum posts, it's not a catastrophe to lose a few, so just running a nightly script to back up new posts to your home PC should be enough.

ServerBeach provides good servers but lacking 24/7 onsite phone supports makes them a poor choice, and yes I’m talking from experience. I have my servers at ThePlanet.com and could not be happier! I’ve called on Christmas, from my Cruise and NEVER worried I would miss a tech or have to wait for them to call me back. I would recommend a nice server from ThePlanet.com or ServerMatrix.com (ThePlanet's budget servers) if you are looking to get a new dedicated server. Leasing a server has its advantages as they replace the hardware free if there are any problems not to mention you get a LOT of bandwidth at these places.

Again if you need someplace to host and the site doesn't require a LOT (read: over 300gb) of bandwidth please feel free to PM and or call me as I`ll try my best to work something out. Also if you need another opinion or have questions about getting a dedicated server (leased or co-located) feel free to give me a call as I’ve been in the industry a while.

Actually, a dedicated server for a small site like this is way overkill. Shared hosting space is fine. There's tons of ISP's that offer it cheap. I like jumpdomain.com for domain registration and their hosting deals look pretty good, but I haven't tried those yet. $20 a month would probably do it for these forums.

For dedicated hosting, theplanet/servermatrix look pretty good, though somewhat more expensive than Serverbeach. What happens if you actually try to use all the bandwidth they advertise? Do they throttle you at some low bit rate or what?

Todd,

Thanks for the offer and I'll put that in my back pocket for right now, but will consider that as a potentially viable option. If you can email me ( dritter at equipped dot org ) with you email contact, I'd appreciate it.

Paul,

I won't rule out "rented" space, but we have to be extremely cautious about any arrangement that requires ongoing regular expenditures. Often the ETS Foundation bank balance is a big fat zero. Budgeting is difficult. The last server cost us virtually nothing for 8 years. I'd expect the new one to last a long time as well. Dave is going to give me our bandwidth use for the past 12 months so we can get a feel for the costs involved if we had to pay for it. I think we're up to about 7-8 GB of storage, as I recall, but don't quote me on that. At times the bandwidth use is mind boggling. All that has to happen is some terrorist incident or major survival incident or natural disaster and it goes through the roof.

I would prefer a RAID array over multiple drives because it allows us to continue uninterrupted if one disk fails. That and power supplies seem to be the most common failure point and most of the rack servers I've been looking at have dual power supplies. In any case, we're just getting into this and where we end up is anybody's guess. Because of our arrangements, simply haven't given it a lot of thought, so just coming up to speed now.

Three disk RAIDs are the norm for the servers I work/play/beat on. Disks 0 and 1 have the data, Disk 3 is error checking. If one fails, we can rebuild it all in a couple of hours.

Actually the data and error checking is striped across all three unless you have a rare controller which supports raid 4 <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Another option is to buy a pair of (or more) servers that are just plain simple servers, no redundant anything and just let the servers themselves be redundant. This works well if you don't have the budget for servers with redundant power supplies and raid controllers and such, just set up some scripts to keep them matching and if something fails in one you run from the other.

Which we have on most of ours. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I'd rather go with a more conventional striped array, but that is a choice above my pay-grade.

But for something like this, yeah, a simplier set up is more worthy. None of us are going to fire Doug and Chris if we loose the archives.

RAID arrays with 3 or more disks (e.g. 2 data and 1 parity) are for when the data won't fit on one disk. A simpler strategy is to just mirror disks. So you'd have a pair of (say) 36 GB disks. 8 GB of data is chickenfeed these days. Note that the 2+1 scheme won't keep running through two disks failing either.

Really, this is quite a small site (what's the maximum number of visits there's ever been in a single day?) and putting it on a shared hosting service should be fine. Those services all use RAID, do regular backups, and all that sort of thing.

Doug,

Can you set up something so we can donate some movey? I'm sure some of us can kick in a few bucks, I'll give 50 bucks or so, I think this site is well worth it.

John

We're examining hosting services, but so far I don't see anything that I would be comfortable with that in the long run won't cost us more than our current arrangement, even buying a replacement server. And, as noted, there are issues with having to pay a monthly fee. But, I haven't ruled it out. We continue to look at the options.

Thanks for your support and interest in making a donation. You will find information on making a donation at:
http://www.equipped.org/donate.htm

Please email me at donate@equipped.org to let me know how much you donated, otherwise I won't find out until either the check arrives or we get the monthly statement from JustGive.com

Thanks again for your support.