In a little bit, the wiki will be going down. I have to physically rearrange the little area of my bedroom that it's in. It's unplanned downtime, I hope nobody *needs* the wiki for a few hours.
What happened is my in-laws dumped some shelves on us that caused us to rearrange part of our living room to incorporate them (we knew the shelves were coming, we didn't know when or what we'd do with them). As a result, I've freed up the TV stand, which is going to become the new home of the server in my bedroom.
I probably could take a few days and give warning and stuff, but that'll leave something of a serious mess in my living room in the meantime. So I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
New furniture: Unplanned wiki down time
Moderator: Lucifer
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Lucifer
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New furniture: Unplanned wiki down time
Be the devil's own, Lucifer's my name.
- Iron Maiden
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Lucifer
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Hmmm, it's not a stupid question, but the answer makes a lot of sense.
First, Money. To get a server not hosted at home, we either need someone to give us charity, or we need to put up money.
Second, we have a lot of web servers going. You mentioned a few, there's also the resource repository. I recently added two sites for the buildbot that don't *have* to be on this server. I guess personally I host a master server, the wiki, the buildbot (which needs a little more work), and I think that's it. Luke's got aabeta and the resource repository, tank's got the forums and he manages the main site, which is on sourceforge.
Is that all of them? Er, no. Tank's added to svn two more master servers that he intends to host, wrtlprnft has a master server, z-man's got a master server, and there's one more and I always forget who has it. Is it Antix that has the fourth? Those kind of require our own servers, but if we were to convert them to web applications we could probably offload them onto a not-dedicated web hosting setup. But that's not a trivial job, either, nor do I even know if it's required.
So, all that said, consider now the amount of administrative work that is required to keep all these things going. I probably come in somewhere around 20 hours every 6 months in work on the wiki that's explicitly for the wiki. A lot of the work I do to maintain the wiki server is rolled into work I do in general for my web server (which hosts my personal web site and some other things). I would expect that the others put in comparable amounts of time in their servers. Some of the time we each put in could be combined if it were all hosted on one server, but some of it could not. Which means someone would have to absorb the whole workload required to maintain all this stuff.
And finally, one server provides a single point of failure. We're trying to move away from a single point of failure for anything. At least now if the wiki goes down, y'all can come over here to do stuff (think about the tournament managing going on over there, and it was sadly down during a recent ladle, but the reason it was down is fixed now). If the forums go down, discussion can happen elsewhere, usually irc. The main website is pretty damn reliable, so people can always download the game, no problem, with it. (Yeah, I know, they can always use the sourceforge pages too)
Anyway, the wiki is back up again and my bedroom is a lot cleaner. Now where should I put the filing cabinet the server used to sit on?
First, Money. To get a server not hosted at home, we either need someone to give us charity, or we need to put up money.
Second, we have a lot of web servers going. You mentioned a few, there's also the resource repository. I recently added two sites for the buildbot that don't *have* to be on this server. I guess personally I host a master server, the wiki, the buildbot (which needs a little more work), and I think that's it. Luke's got aabeta and the resource repository, tank's got the forums and he manages the main site, which is on sourceforge.
Is that all of them? Er, no. Tank's added to svn two more master servers that he intends to host, wrtlprnft has a master server, z-man's got a master server, and there's one more and I always forget who has it. Is it Antix that has the fourth? Those kind of require our own servers, but if we were to convert them to web applications we could probably offload them onto a not-dedicated web hosting setup. But that's not a trivial job, either, nor do I even know if it's required.
So, all that said, consider now the amount of administrative work that is required to keep all these things going. I probably come in somewhere around 20 hours every 6 months in work on the wiki that's explicitly for the wiki. A lot of the work I do to maintain the wiki server is rolled into work I do in general for my web server (which hosts my personal web site and some other things). I would expect that the others put in comparable amounts of time in their servers. Some of the time we each put in could be combined if it were all hosted on one server, but some of it could not. Which means someone would have to absorb the whole workload required to maintain all this stuff.
And finally, one server provides a single point of failure. We're trying to move away from a single point of failure for anything. At least now if the wiki goes down, y'all can come over here to do stuff (think about the tournament managing going on over there, and it was sadly down during a recent ladle, but the reason it was down is fixed now). If the forums go down, discussion can happen elsewhere, usually irc. The main website is pretty damn reliable, so people can always download the game, no problem, with it. (Yeah, I know, they can always use the sourceforge pages too)
Anyway, the wiki is back up again and my bedroom is a lot cleaner. Now where should I put the filing cabinet the server used to sit on?
Be the devil's own, Lucifer's my name.
- Iron Maiden
Ask me for charity, I can give a little.Lucifer wrote:Hmmm, it's not a stupid question, but the answer makes a lot of sense.
First, Money. To get a server not hosted at home, we either need someone to give us charity, or we need to put up money.
Z-man already has access to a virtual system of mine.
(http://hosteurope.de/produkt/VPS-Linux-XXL-2.0 with Debian 3.1)
True, good point, imho the most important. If just the database on a single server is an option, I am sure one could come up with some way of loadbalacing the http requests using DNS or this (http://spootnik.org/hoststated/hoststat ... ction.html).Lucifer wrote:And finally, one server provides a single point of failure. We're trying to move away from a single point of failure for anything.
About the other stuff... yes, there need to be multiple master servers but I wasn't talking about them, just the forums, mainsite, beta, wiki stuff.
However, it is fine how it works now. =)
- bel
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Tank Program
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Tank Program
- Forum & Project Admin, PhD
- Posts: 6711
- Joined: Thu Dec 18, 2003 7:03 pm
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Tank Program
- Forum & Project Admin, PhD
- Posts: 6711
- Joined: Thu Dec 18, 2003 7:03 pm
