Forum outage tomorrow morning

[Sim]

The forum will be offline Wednesday the 12th Feb for approximately 2 hours from 8am until around 10am. During this time we will be moving the forum to a new server.

There may be some slight issues for a while afterwards while we wait for DNS servers around the world to be updated with the new location - but we will have facilities in place to deal with theses issues as best we can during the changeover period. There may also be a delay with the chatroom becoming available again after the move - as this is related to the DNS servers as well.

Please email webmaster@somersoft.com if you have any questions or difficulties

[Sunstone]

Dear Sim,

What will be the implications of the new server?

Fast access? Better able to handle growth with more searches and almost 1,000 registered users.... Lower operating cost for Ian (Hopefully)?

Curious.....

Cheers,

Sunstone.

[Sim]

Hopefully a better server - more importantly about 1250% (yes, that's one thousand two hundred and fifty percent) cheaper bandwidth !!!

So plenty of room to grow - and that also means we can start adding more of the neato features that we wanted to add when we first moved to this software but were constrained by bandwidth costs.

Growth in bandwidth usage has been approaching 20% per month - but that is a good thing... means an increasingly popular forum.

Access speeds should be just as fast - there are fewer users on this new server, and it is hosted in the main Optus data centre in Sydney, so I'm hoping it will be very quick.

[Robert]

Yipee...

It's being hosted by Optus. That suits me down to a tee, cause I use Optus for my ISP. Means that access speeds will be really good for me.

Unless the inhouse cabling in Optus wiring isn't any good.

Sim, can you tell me what sort of protocol Optus are using from the server to the Node/Switch and what speed it is?

Just asking cause I'm interested...

Cheers
Robert

[Sim]

Unfortunately I have no idea Robert - it's not our server (hosting company), so I don't know what they have implemented.

Our current server is also on the Optus network I think - so I'm not sure you'll see terribly much improvement - if any.

[Sim]

Forum is back !

You will probably lose your list of new posts - sorry. You can use the "Todays active threads" to see new posts in the last 24 hours, or use the "day search" facility from the search page for earlier new posts.

We have to use the IP addresses for a while until the DNS servers propogate the changes in server around the world.

If there are any problems, please email webmaster@somersoft.com

[Sim]

Sorry for the delay in getting the forum operational again - they had to try and find a copy of "unzip" on the unix server we moved to so they could extract the database upload. You get that :rolleyes:

[Sim]

You may also have a few problems with links pasted into posts for a couple of days until the DNS servers catch up with us. It will start working as expected in due course.