| General updates... | by lmbedore |
| FTP: The FTP connectivity problem (FTP would disconnect if you tried to chmod a file, or if your FTP client tried to set a UMASK when it first connected) has been fixed, as of a few days ago. Much thanks to Jeremy and Jeff for tracking down that extremely peculiar bug. Slow Response: Since Jason and myself have only had dialup access (and shoddy dialup at that, being pushed through 2 NATs), we've had practically zero exposure to VectorStar as of late. I haven't even had time to check my email at VectorStar any more than about once every two days. However, Verizon claims that we will have DSL as of tomorrow (Monday)! If that's actually true (which prudence tells me to doubt with the greatest possible amount of scorn), then I'll be able to do some very seriously-needed updates to the servers and reinstate new user signups. Upgrades: Some time in approximately 3 weeks (might be 5 weeks, knowing us!), we'll be taking down VectorStar for a couple hours (hopefully only about 1 hour!) in order to add a new RAID card to Apathy, replace a less-than-desirably-stable processor in Chester, upgrade it to Apathy's old SCSI subsystem, and give it a fresh installation of Slackware 8. Moving stuff around: We've consolidated all of vectorstar.net onto Apathy. Our hardware upgrades to Apathy should ensure exceptional performance for our services. The venerable Vector is getting itself retired from public duty, and will be passing its torch down to Chester just as soon as we can fix up Chester to the current level of quality held by Apathy. Chester will be handling vectorstar.com, which will be growing to accomodate some code development (Pogo likes writing excessively complex code to display the text message "8======D" in as many ways as possible), as well as a few for-profit ventures. :) Growth: I got my domain renewal reminders from Verisign this week, and it got me thinking about how much VectorStar has grown since its initial conception. Wow. We have got ourselves approximately 375 users. I'm not in the mood to actually figure the exact number right now, so 375 is close enough. That sure is a bigger number than the 2 websites we handled back in 1995-1996, or the dozen sites and domains we did in 1998-1999. Around this time last year, we had just over 100 users. We grew to 200, then stopped accepting new users while we upgraded our systems to handle greater capacity. That off-time dwindled us down to about 100 again, and in the last few months we've burst up once more. Last year at this time, we ran VectorStar on one Pentium-II 266 with 4gb of disk space and one Pentium 133 with 16gb of FTP space. We added a couple Sun SPARC machines, upgraded them, and eventually replaced them with a pair of high-octane Dual Pentium-II Xeon servers. Having two Dual-Xeon servers with 36gb of SCSI-RAID storage is quite a step above the AMD 5x86-133 with a 1gb hard drive and 32mb of RAM that started VectorStar. The next year of growth should be even bigger than the last. With the levels of growth we see with VectorStar Networks, it's quite possible that we will be outgrowing Linux in the not-so-distant future. Sure, we can hack up and patch kernels to make our systems meet our performance needs, but we don't believe that such a management philosophy is valid for anything, including a free service. That means that we may move ourselves to a more potent UNIX fairly soon. That could mean FreeBSD (if they ever finish their SMP support), SCO UNIX, BSDi, or Solaris. Since we haven't quite hit that hurdle, we won't jump it quite yet. :) I'd just like to add a final thanks to all the people who have used VectorStar and those who continue to do so! | |
| Re: General updates... | by Stephen |
| Goood it's Monday now. So hopefully.... I will be able to join up today. I went with tripod then with usclargo but both wanted me to have adverts on my site. But... I think VectorStar might just be the thing. NO ADVERTS!!!! As soon as I can join up, I will! Keep it up VECTORSTAR!!>>>>> | |
| Re: General updates... | by caridwen |
| now my head hurts. | |
| Re: General updates... | by vahman |
| Why do females always have to say "my head hurts". Hopefully Laird and I will also go on a 1u rackmount adventure in the near future. We will see what happens. | |
| Re: General updates... | by pogo |
| 8====w===D | |
| Re: General updates... | by stale |
| Yeah, it's been pretty fun playing around with all of this junk over the years. It's a shame I had to go out and get myself a life, so I just don't have as much time to mess around with the network anymore.
| |
| Re: General updates... | by bobshoe |
| WTF is a Pondera? | |
| Re: General updates... | by Stephen |
| Well it's wednesday now. Still not accepting user sign-ups? What a pity, I've told all my friend I will proberly get my site online this week. Well it gives me plenty of time to fine tune it though. I'm asking my friends to join up offline now. Well I don't have much chioce I want a free server with at least 20 megs and no adverts. I think this might be the only place. Well I'm sure VectorStar will be alright once they have got it all sorted out. Get accepting new user sign-ups soon!!!!!>>>>>>>> | |
| Re: General updates... | by pogo |
| 7+++++++++++*------------4+=3+============2++++++++$ understand? | |
| Re: General updates... | by Stephen |
| Don't nock hotmail me and my mum and a friend use hotmail and we do not receive ANY JUNK MAIL!! | |
| Re: General updates... | by vrolok |
| props to the admins for doing such a badass job. i remember being one of the first 10 or something and it's cool knowing all the old school vector people. anyway, thanks for being the best, and stephen, settle down. seriously. | |