Re: [gentoo-dev] forums

[Kyle Manna <nitro@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 2002-08-05 at 11:39, Alexander Gretencord wrote:
> On Monday 05 August 2002 18:15, Jason Pratt wrote:
> > Are the forums no longer available? I can't access them :(
> 
> Somebody on #gentoo said something about bad ram. I find it annoying that 
> theres nothing on the gentoo page or on the mailling lists from official 
> staff. Could you pls comment and give an ETA ? (Even if it says we dunno when 
> we get the new ram but say something :))

In an attempt to satisfy your questions here is the scoop.

The forums have been plagued since a few months after starting.  At
first they were started on my personal server, worked great, but soon
started chewing too much bandwith.  We moved them to primary gentoo
server (ie: the one that handles gentoo.org, mailing lists, cvs, and
primary rsync mirror).  That was okay for a while, but soon we started
to chew too much CPU and there wasn't to go around for all the other
services, and the forums were taking a hit.

Soon after, we moved them once again. Kurt Lieber, the other global
moderator, had talked to a guy who would give us colo and rack space and
about 5Mb/s of bandwidth.  Kurt chipped in and donated the hardware and
the new server was born.  This worked great for about a month or two and
then we ran in to more problems. :(  Apparently the last week or two one
of our stick of RAM started dying. So, I had a nice little surpise of a
bunch of logged segfaults.  Common forum visitors may have noticed the
database connection error message, that was because MySQL was touching
(or trying to), touch the bad RAM; not us hitting the max connections as
I originally thought.  I'm not 100% sure when the RAM first started to
die, but it may have been at most a month ago, and may have been the
reason the kernel paniced and we were down for about 10 hours.

So, the RAM was replaced with a stick of Kingston DDR PC2100 ECC. 
Server came up yesterday at around noon (central time), and I check it
out, seemed that the other problems healed up for the most part.

Then, we went down again yesterday at about 6:15 (central time), our
provider (the guy who is donating the bandwidth and colo rack, started
to make his move to the new datacenter.  Fun.  We died for another few
hours and were back up before I went to bed.  Now, it is Aug 6, 1:50 and
the server is again unreachable.  I think our provider is playing with
his routers.  Umm, so we are once again in the dark (I guess we get what
we pay for huh? :))

Hopefully he will finish soon, and we might actually be stable for once.

To answer the argument that has been brewing here, the forums are in
part run by actual Gentoo developers.  This is primarily me, and few
developers moderate appropriate forums.  Most of the other moderators
are simply users.

I was hoping I could wait and write this email later and be able to tell
you all that the server is finally stable, but it isn't.  I guess I will
write that email later.


Holy cow, did I write all this?  Jeez..

> 
> Alex
> 
> -- 
> "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
> deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> Benjamin Franklin
> 
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-- 

- Kyle Manna
<nitro [at] gentoo [dot] org>
Gentoo Linux: http://www.gentoo.org
Support Forums: http://forums.gentoo.org