The website situation: First off, I must apologize for the website downtime (and on behalf of Brian for the bad splash page). Anyhow, what happened was Josh upgraded the forum last week (without making any backups) and things messed up pretty badly. Skin wasn't compatible, and among other things, there were MySQL database corruptions. I thought this would be a good opportunity to move over to vBulletin, but, it turns out that in the long run it would be better sticking to IPB (easier too). I fixed up the MySQL database, forum theme, etc, and here we are now. There are still quite a few tweaks that need to take place (most notably the front page), but for the most part, everything is up and running. If you have any suggestions or ideas for the website, please feel free to post in the "Website Improvements" section. The server situation: Actually, it's a NEW server situation. Literally. I ordered a new dedicated box today with better hardware. You all should know what that means: Less lag, and potential for more servers. We are currently running on a 3GHz Q9650 and we are upgrading to a Lynnfield (i7-based Xeon) x3460 @ 2.8GHz. The clock speed is slightly slower (actually, it will be running at 2.93-3.5 GHz because of a technology called Turbo Mode), but the architectural jump by itself will help with server performance greatly. On top of that, we are going to try running all of the services on a Kernel called Zen kernel, which is a very high performance Linux kernel. The combination of the two should compliment each other very nicely. I hope to get some benchmarks soon to post. The new server should be online sometime this weekend. In the meantime, Kyle and I have a very busy remainder of the week. Server IP's will stay the same, and the server downtime will be minimal - as we won't be moving the IP's over to the new box until everything is ready. Update 9/27/2010 5:25PM: All servers are online!
Sweet the forums are back! Thanks for sacrificing all that fap fap fap time to get things back up and running Ray! <3
Arch smells OpenSSH and VSFTPD were finished before I went to bed last night, though EDIT: Ugh... CentOS installer crashed :mellow:
Alrighty well, Debian Six is installed and configured (Still in beta). VSFTPD and OpenSSH are both installed and configured, along with the base user accounts. My modified Kernel which is based on Zen-Sources compiled fine last night after my third attempt, the switch over was pretty smooth. The test server that I threw up seemed promising, hopefully this brings us over the threshold. The only thing that's left to be done is come up with a better way of managing the servers, create a new SRCDS base and go from there.