Hosting crisis averted for now

F

fury

Administrator
Staff member
If there's anything out of order, it's probably a result of something not taking as well to the move as I would have liked.

I've moved the sites onto my servers, which means Sam doesn't have to pay another dime (as soon as he transfers me the domains). And I don't have to pay any more than I already am. I just have to make sure I keep them up for everyone else that's on them. They're a bit more expensive (i think like 5x as much as Sam was paying), but will soon be plenty more roomy (forthcoming hard drive upgrades), and I'm not putting any restrictions on bandwidth or anything.

The main thing is that I don't have a Cpanel equivalent, so everything that's running on the servers is pretty much customized, duct-taped, etc. If there was anyone with a mail account on any of the three sites, they're going to have to wait a bit while I find a suitable replacement program to organize the mail on my servers. (The one I got is a bit cumbersome, and doesn't allow for domain-based separation/account setup, so I have to make a new Unix user account for everyone, and they all get mail at the same inbox at every domain on the server)

Other than that, I think my servers have just about every capability that the sites need, and probably some they don't but could get significant use from. This should be a positive change overall, eventually, once I get any and all kinks worked out.

I'm not expecting any compensation, cause I do owe it to Sam and all the guys & gals here & there for being my favorite dysfunctional Internet family since 2001, and being the reason I ever wanted to learn to dig into the code and screw stuff up. But, any assistance I could get would be awesome and help me keep improving the performance and capabilities of the servers.
 
What do you mean by "They're a bit more expensive (i think like 5x as much as Sam was paying), but will soon be plenty more roomy (forthcoming hard drive upgrades), and I'm not putting any restrictions on bandwidth or anything." ??

Also, PM me your addy please, I'd like to send off a cheque.
 
fury pays almost 200 a month for his servers, where i was paying 40 for a spot on a server.
Plus the host we had had limits to the size of databases we have and the amount of traffic we could get in a month. If we went over we had to pay extra for it. Plus on DB size once we got to close we would have to purge off old info where we wont have to now.
 
Monies will be forthcoming, Dennis.
Thanks for all you are doing for this dysfunctional cyber family. :)

Can I make you some cookies, or a cake? :D
 
Thanks all. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. (But that's because I've ingested more than my fair share of cat hair.) And I feel the love too <3

Cookies and/or cake would be agreeable, not quite sure how we'd arrange for them to be transferred and consumed though, they tend to break and spoil during the ride in the UPS truck :lloyd: Unless the chef can make a house call.

Nixy said:
What do you mean by "They're a bit more expensive (i think like 5x as much as Sam was paying), but will soon be plenty more roomy (forthcoming hard drive upgrades), and I'm not putting any restrictions on bandwidth or anything." ??

Also, PM me your addy please, I'd like to send off a cheque.
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I mean, with this arrangement Sam doesn't have to pay anymore, and it's not imposing any more monetary costs on me to be hosting, it's just that the main compromise is the current situation with the mail... I'll be looking for a solution to that until I find one (cause it doesn't make much sense to keep looking after you've found it, right? :tardbang: )

And the already-present disk space I am lacking but will soon not be. I'm making up for it right now by shifting some stuff on my game that isn't being used right now but i'd like to put it back eventually once i've got the space. I'll do whatever it takes to keep it going. Somehow I always manage to do it, despite having doubts just about every month for the last 3 years (or however long it is that I've had a dedicated server/servers).
 
Dennis i just wanted to say thanks again, I really didnt want to have to close or sell the sites but didnt see any other way for me to do this.
Plus any donations we get i will push over to him for helping us out.

Again thanks to you all for your generosity to keeping the site alive.
 
Hey fury, what distro are you running the server at?

For servers I like Debian, r4 just went out last week.
 
Luis G said:
Hey fury, what distro are you running the server at?

For servers I like Debian, r4 just went out last week.
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4.0 came out nearly a month ago now. Too new and buggy for me though--I'm stickin' with Sarge. ;)

fury, you might try this for a flexible virtual-hosting email solution. It's what I use on our hosting networks (I've modified it to run SA in MySQL and shared the whole thing for round-robin access). I'm in the middle of recreating plesk/cpanel for our own with this being the cornerstone of it all. PM me if you need any help with anything at all server or whatever related. :headbang:
 
Mirlyn said:
4.0 came out nearly a month ago now. Too new and buggy for me though--I'm stickin' with Sarge. ;)
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Woah, already a month? Time flies no doubt :lol:

I haven't had the guts to upgrade our servers yet. Installing sarge on the new server was kind of a pain since the kernel didn't have support for the scsi interface, that's a plus for etch. My workaround was to boot from a live CD, tar xfz the image of an already installed server, compile newer kernel and reboot.
 
Luis G said:
Woah, already a month? Time flies no doubt :lol:

I haven't had the guts to upgrade our servers yet. Installing sarge on the new server was kind of a pain since the kernel didn't have support for the scsi interface, that's a plus for etch.
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I've always done kernels by hand. Way too much work, but I feel like it keeps me aware of what some of these machines really run on hardware-wise. :D Keeps my "to upgrade" list updated. Trying to standardize systems so I can use a universal kernel, but I'm still a ways away from that.

When etch was released, I was in the middle of replacing firewalls for our new /22. I had installed etch on a test machine and then I read about the ip_forwarding bug and have been turned off ever since. Just don't have time to beta-test a firewall that soon before production, especially looking for those kinds of problems. I'll wait until at least r1 is released before I start testing again.

I do know etch detected our SATA drive and boot configs without a problem, which 3.1r4 coughs and dies on. The installer really is smarter. ;)
 
Yeah, 3.1r4 has a 2.6.8 kernel which lacks drivers for many SATA, SCSI and SAS interfaces, particullary RAID ones. I'm using a 2.6.18 on two servers and the rest I like to keep them with a 2.4.32 (meaning I'm to lazy to change it), if it ain't broke, why fix it, right? ;) Both kernels manually configured and compiled by me.

I firewall them by putting all ports on reject except the ones that I do use (22, 80, 443, 25, etc). I prevent brute force on ssh, pop3 and smtp by using recent, so I can allow a limited number of connections from a certain IP within a small time. Typically 10 ssh connections every 10 minutes, that really keeps them off.
 
Luis G said:
Yeah, 3.1r4 has a 2.6.8 kernel which lacks drivers for many SATA, SCSI and SAS interfaces, particullary RAID ones. I'm using a 2.6.18 on two servers and the rest I like to keep them with a 2.4.32 (meaning I'm to lazy to change it), if it ain't broke, why fix it, right? ;) Both kernels manually configured and compiled by me.

I firewall them by putting all ports on reject except the ones that I do use (22, 80, 443, 25, etc). I prevent brute force on ssh, pop3 and smtp by using recent, so I can allow a limited number of connections from a certain IP within a small time. Typically 10 ssh connections every 10 minutes, that really keeps them off.
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Only happens with these intel boards. Some boot up fine. Probably something with the newer 965 chipsets. Think they're using newer NICs too as the stock installer's e1000 driver doesn't work, but the kernel's version works fine.

I like drop better than reject. Wastes more time (wait for a timeout vs bounce).
 
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