Server Hardware Fault

[Scribble]

Give paying users access to a fully working Search function. I bet that'd bring in the money.

 

[mukichan]

New to the forum, but not new to FA, and certainly not new to hardware failures. I'm not trying to be condescending in the least bit, nor am I trying to make myself seem better than anyone else. I'm not here attempting to troll. I'm simply asking for clarification, and maybe a clue or two as to why the long delay.

I work for the government. I'm used to lowest-bidder crap for hardware. We've had (very) critical hardware failures at least six times since the beginning of my employment, as a result, corrupting and destroying terabytes of data. And the equipment, I can guarantee, is a bit more advanced than a simple web-server. Over 128 terabytes of arial photographs, photographs of title and deed documents, mortgage documents, among other heavily used information that is maintained on a daily basis. And despite several NIC, motherboard, hard drive, RAID controller, CPU, and RAM failures, it's never taken us longer than a weekend to revive our systems. This includes a full redeployment of Windows Server 2003, and several UNIX and Sun virtual systems, a full restore of an active directory environment for over 7,000 computers, and 6,000 employee accounts, completed by two people, including a full security lockdown/test setup. Myself, and my supervisor were said two people. This is minus order/shipping times, which took five business days. So my question is, if two barely mediocre hacks such as myself and (less so, he's pretty good) my supervisor can take care of these issues in a short amount of time, why is FA going to be down for so long?

On another account, we had a full RIS server failure in the middle of a deployment of sixty new public-access terminals. It took approximately six working hours after the "NTLDR.EXE is missing" message to repair, including a full upgrade to WDS over RIS, and several added images. The issue was a dying on-board RAID controller. Putting more than thirty computers on the connection at once over-taxed the system and finally got it to drop. Now the system is back up and running, and can handle over three hundred simultaneous imaging connections without even so much as a double-take.

On a third account, the Clerk's Office home page has gone down due to hardware failures twice in its existence, exists on old Gateway (I didn't make the decision, politicians with tight pockets did) servers, and has a total down-time of 15 hours since its creation in 2002. Average hits per day? 1,265,000. The site has obviously undergone several changes since 2002, however has remained stable despite being hosted on a $1300 server with a single T3 connection. (The Hamptons and the real estate being what it has been with foreclosures and the like have increased the number of hits significantly, and the sever still rarely sees above 80% load.)

I fail to see how it could possibly take a group of people two weeks to install, deploy, and test a single group of web-servers, some of the most basic kinds of servers to set up.

Maybe I'm just short-sighted. Maybe my standards are a little high/stringent. Maybe working with private sector businesses, then subsequently the government has me a little tight-arsed with what I expect out of a site. But all that aside, why over a week from hardware install to final deployment? Even working two hours a day, that should only take three days. And that's assuming you're using a *nix-based web server, and throwing IIS into the trash where it belongs. (SQL injection attacks FTL. See also: Comcast.)

If you'd like, I'll gladly take over, complete the project. What's the donation amount up to now? $10k? With 6 hours and a $10k budget, I'd build a server cluster that could handle the load FA recieves on a daily basis, and still have about 60% resources free. Then again - that's also assuming the inflated government prices companies usually throw at us. Seeing as it's technically private sector, I'm sure I could also complete the project under-budget too, given the chance to shop around some. Hell - have the server built by Dell, and get yourself some 4-hour support, and guaranteed compatibility. Critical hardware failure? Four hours to repair and be back up and running, or your money back. Our section of the government switched to Dell two years ago for most of its servers, and down-time has been no longer than four hours per incident since. Total cost more than custom-built? $1150.00 Not too shabby, considering we've gotten over $8,000 worth of free parts out of it.

Sorry if my first post is a little confrontational. It's just a touchy subject with me when I know it can be done quicker, with the same amount of confidence, using different resources. I'm only trying for some answers, not to ruffle any feathers or to rub any fur the wrong way. I suck at art. I'm a barely mediocre musician. I'm an okay author. I only do two things exceptionally well. Cars and Computers. Cars aren't very useful to the furry community. Computers can be. I'm more or less just offering my services to the community.

... I think my brain just fried. xD Kinda sorta understand the little bits and pieces but, to me it looks like you're saying that the fA admins and staff aren't doing a great job compared to people like you who has the government basically spoiling them with equips and stuff for you to work with. I'm not trying to cause drama, I just want to know what exactly is being said here. I mean, I just literally woke up like 10 minutes ago and still feel a lil groggy. xD lmao

 

[seaweed]

Okay, for the last f**king time guys, PLEASE DO NOT TALK ABOUT PAY FOR USE OR SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR FA ONCE IT COMES BACK UP.

This thread is FOR THE OUTAGE ONLY!

I swear that whoever writes about it after this post, I will report it. every single one.

I am REALLY REALLY tired of people CONTINUOUSLY not paying attention to this.

Make your own f**king thread if you want to so we don't have to read it.


Try me. See if I don't report you.

 

[steelbeard]

What happens when you deprive a world of furries of their fursmut site (FA) ??

you get a 112 page !!!!! forum thread !!!!

Holy cow, I've seen some replies but this takes it to another level.

 

[blade]

Seaweed, relax. They're just batting around ideas and nothing is set in stone.

 

[WolfoxOkamichan]

So uhh... any news on when we're gonna have it up?

 

[Kraton]

i wonder if anybody noticed waaay back there that 'ensue' is only one letter off from 'ensure' and it may have just been a typo...;P

I thought of that too, actually. don't know why I didn't mention it. XD

 

[Kraton]

Okay, for the last f**king time guys, PLEASE DO NOT TALK ABOUT PAY FOR USE OR SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR FA ONCE IT COMES BACK UP.

This thread is FOR THE OUTAGE ONLY!

I swear that whoever writes about it after this post, I will report it. every single one.

I am REALLY REALLY tired of people CONTINUOUSLY not paying attention to this.

Make your own f**king thread if you want to so we don't have to read it.


Try me. See if I don't report you.

Thank you, and personally, I'm just going to add anyone who continues on that subject to my ignored list. Easily done.

 

[Yellow07]

FA has had its ups and downs; still I'm surprised its gained so much money from donations =3 Shows how kind a community the fandom is

lol there has seemed to be several arguments that have been repeated over and over, still at least things are moving foreword; shame it had to happen right near the US holoday period, 4th a special day to yanks ^^ Not so grand for us brits >.>

XDXDXD

Anyway, where are they getting this new piece of kit from? The location of the store house will show you delivery time, also installment and such will be done in the admin staffs own free time, they have their jobs and other stuff to do also... in fact that deserves a lot of credit really, like volunteer work really; operating a site while juggling lifes other stuff =3

Also, how much has been raised? Curious =3 I mean if there is more than enough, more backup kit could be purchased or, as someone else has suggested, donate to charity ^^ The Furry Fandom has raised heaps of money for chairties over the world; lol in fact er're in the Guinnis world book of records XD Seriously!

 

[Guardian]

Well it's nice to see so many Donated to FA. They were barely expecting to make 4k and made more than double that. Maybe it'll keep the site running alot longer and maybe even give Dragoneer a little bit of a bonus for working so hard.

 

[ArielMT]

So uhh... any news on when we're gonna have it up?

Not 'til the hardware arrives, and the hardware can't even ship 'til the morrow at the earliest. If I read the threads here right, they're going to wait until shops open before they order, by which time they'll have a clear idea of how much money they can spend.

 

[lupus_shearhart]

... I think my brain just fried. xD Kinda sorta understand the little bits and pieces but, to me it looks like you're saying that the fA admins and staff aren't doing a great job compared to people like you who has the government basically spoiling them with equips and stuff for you to work with. I'm not trying to cause drama, I just want to know what exactly is being said here. I mean, I just literally woke up like 10 minutes ago and still feel a lil groggy. xD lmao

No. To be honest, I wish the government would spoil us with equipment. Instead, we get lowest-bidder-crap, barely adequate budgets, and are told to run the world on a common house-hold PC budget. Like I said in another post, when we set up the active directory structure for all of the offices, we had a budget the same of that of the average US household does for a new PC. Things have since changed, but to be honest, when things first started, we counted ourselves lucky to be using decommissioned Optiplex GX1 desktops as servers. When I say we had to bring the Clerk's office out of the stone-age, I meant it. In a time where Vista was starting to become Microsoft's new standard, they were still upgrading to 2000, running on P2-450's, and figured 128 megs of RAM was all anyone ever needed.

Yeah - other parts of the government (military, CIA, FBI, federal stuff) get top-of-the-line, instant-support, 1-hour-hand-delivery-of-parts... but our section? Every year, it's a struggle just to keep our paychecks and health benefits, let alone trying to get a thousand or two into the budget for upgrades and maintenance.

My question, after my long mini-rant was simply this:
Shipping aside. (Shipping sucks. I've seen things take months due to back-orders. I understand that blight fully.) How could it possibly take two weeks from reciept of components to final deployment? I understand underestimating one's own abilities as to not give people false hope, but two weeks?

Congrats on the donations, congrats on the new budget. And congrats on managing a system this large with relatively few screw-ups. I'm not trying to crack on anyone. Again - I'm just trying to get a scope as to what's going on that could possibly take the time it is. And if I could offer my help in any way, let me know.

 

[Meca Penguin]

US$ 10,477.15 only throught Amazon.

That means that Dragoneer will make something neat! Can't wait to see what that will be.
Also, I'd like to say that, after reading a hundred pages, FA has the best community I've ever seen, and the most open and cool headed one even. I guess that your dedication, love and caring for FA is what makes it special, and I hope that never changes. Congratulations to all of you. All of the 50.000 active users.

I'm sure that you will get much more money than 15k.
After all, you all deserve a wonderful place like FA.

 

[steelbeard]

I was going to make a comical suggestion about having a spare ZX81 that FA could borrow for the site but I suspect that it would pre-date the majority of the fandom and therefore be lost.

Honest.. I do still have one in the atic.. no idea if it still runs as it probably hasn't been powered up for about twenty five years!

 

[ArielMT]

Well it's nice to see so many Donated to FA. They were barely expecting to make 4k and made more than double that. Maybe it'll keep the site running alot longer and maybe even give Dragoneer a little bit of a bonus for working so hard.

It's bigger than that. The original goal was $2,000 before Neer bumped it up on Tuesday evening. The reported Amazon donations alone are currently 524% of the original goal.

 

[Guardian]

So uhh... any news on when we're gonna have it up?

I expect 2 weeks at the earliest. Since shpping computer components usually is a bit.. slower than most purchases online. Unless they do it at a nearby store, which I highly doubt as much better deals can be found online.

Then there's the effect of actually imputting the device, which can take less than a day or alot longer if it causes complications. But since it's furs who are doing the computer work, ( Who most of which seem to be very technologically advanced in one way or another. ) It shouldn't take too long.

Just find something else to do for a week or two, while checking back 15 minutes every day, like spring cleaning lol.

 

[Guardian]

It's bigger than that. The original goal was $2,000 before Neer bumped it up on Tuesday evening. The reported Amazon donations alone are currently 524% of the original goal.

I didn't see that. I thought the original goal was 4k. Oh well, I guess that's even better eh? :3

 

[lupus_shearhart]

I was going to make a comical suggestion about having a spare ZX81 that FA could borrow for the site but I suspect that it would pre-date the majority of the fandom and therefore be lost.

Honest.. I do still have one in the atic.. no idea if it still runs as it probably hasn't been powered up for about twenty five years!

Ooh ooh ooooooohhhh! PASS IT MY WAY! >.> I heart vintage hardware. Srsly, you're not using it! I still have fun with my Tandy Trash-80. But - ehh.

 

[RailRide]

As someone who has ground their way through all 112* pages of this thread, it occurs to me that with all the first-time posters here, an oft-discussed aspect of the currently missing search function is overlooked.

It was turned off for being a serious resource hog, buried within a codebase so inefficient and poorly written that hardware upgrades would still not make it viable. Remember that FA was rather hurriedly put together in response to SheezyArt abruptly banning adult submissions. Hence the Ferrox project, which at last progress report (noted a few weeks ago in these forums for those who only started reading them during this outage) even the incomplete code presently has a working search.

In any case, a working search function for the current set of programming that runs FA behind the scenes would have to be coded from scratch, and even if such a project were begun (or put in motion as a result of the current downtime), I strongly suspect that it would rely on user-specified tags, which a lot of FA artists (including many high-profile ones) have been ignoring ever since they were implemented. (I myself added tags to all my existing submissions at the time the feature was added, and at 280+ submissions now, I'm ahead of the game).

The drop-down lists are slated to go away, since covering most existing and future requests would eventually make uploading a tedious process--witness DA users already complaining here about the time needed to wade through the category selection tree every time they upload. Not to mention that drop-down lists fail on submissions that qualify for multiple entries in a single category.

Long story short, even if these mad schemes of cooking up additional features long-promised for the general membership and then reserving them for hypothetical subscription users came to fruition (which it won't), there's no way they'd be finished in time for FA's resurrection. (and an actual search, if it could be coded before the new servers go live, still wouldn't cover a large chunk of submissions thanks to many of the same users clamoring for a search function in the first place)

---PCJ

*(it was 112 when I started writing this)

 

[lupus_shearhart]

My apologies, I read another thread only to find out you guys are planning on using PowerEdge or HP systems. It is of my strong, STRONG recommendation to go with the PowerEdge series. With the way the systems are designed (clock timing in par with each other component in the system, etc.), the load-balancing systems involved, and the OpenManage system that integrates with the BIOS I/O, it's hard not to choose them.

But in any case, good luck. I guess my questions will go unanswered. But that's fine. Take all the time you need, guys.

 

[Sslaxx]

I was going to make a comical suggestion about having a spare ZX81 that FA could borrow for the site but I suspect that it would pre-date the majority of the fandom and therefore be lost.

Honest.. I do still have one in the atic.. no idea if it still runs as it probably hasn't been powered up for about twenty five years!

Weren't those advertised as being capable of running a nuclear power station?

 

[ArielMT]

I didn't see that. I thought the original goal was 4k. Oh well, I guess that's even better eh? :3

Indeed. :3

I think that we furries are stepping up enough to not only afford 'em some seriously sweet hardware, but maybe to pay the extra (and I guarantee it'll be a HUGELY expensive extra!) to have the new hardware shipped overnight.

 

[Crossdouble]

basically that topic gets out of hand and should finally be closed, only announcements should be made IF there are any news.

I do not care about your crappy crap slap stuff you all talk about in here.

You click that link on the main page to get the info when it comes back online. so you go to the last page and what do you find? Lesbs talking about Amber sex and whatnot for nice subscriptions just that they show "OH YES I HAVE DONATED I AM THE KING OF FA".

NO! That topic is not there for that.

It should inform the others simply and quickly how the status is, the status of the online-being of FA, NOT about the status what the ones who give in a buck, how they are treated from now on.
Because in my opinion it does not matter we all sit in the same boat.

 

[STrRedWolf]

basically that topic gets out of hand and should finally be closed, only announcements should be made IF there are any news.
...
It should inform the others simply and quickly how the status is, the status of the online-being of FA, NOT about the status what the ones who give in a buck, how they are treated from now on.
Because in my opinion it does not matter we all sit in the same boat.

Seconded. Please close and have admins update this main sticky thread instead.

 

[SDWolf]

So uhh... any news on when we're gonna have it up?

When It's Readyâ„¢


As has been mentioned before, they're ordering the equipment on Monday (tomorrow). Allow a few days for shipping. Then, once everything arrives they'll have to:

1. Test to make sure nothing's DOA
2. Install the OSes
3. Get everything configured properly
4. Deal with unexpected hardware/software quirks
5. Copy the data from the old servers to the new
6. Test everything
7. Fix any problems that crop up during testing
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 as many times as needed
9. Bring the site back online

I suspect we're looking at a week or two, with steps 4-8 being the most time-consuming.