Star Frontiers Network

I don't know if anybody noticed but things weren't working properly last night. It turns out the disk filled up and so you couldn't post and such as there was no room to write the data to the database. That's fixed now so there shouldn't be any more problems. Sorry about that.

My motherboard on my main server died Sunday (Oct 5th) morning. I got the site back up by 1:45 MDT Sunday running on an older machine while I get the cool fast one fixed. Sorry about the down time and the slowness (if noticeable) while I effect repairs.

So I have a temporary replacement motherboard on the main system and the forums are back on-line there. This is a low end board and for some reason it throttles the CPU when the core temperature gets above a certain point. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a a control to set the throttle temp, either in software or the BIOS, and it is really way too low for this chip. Even two of the four cores running full out trip it up so the CPU is really limited.

I should get the real board repaired and replaced sometime in the next week or so. Until then we'll see how it goes. As users you probably won't even notice.

The site will be down probably for most of the day tomorrow (Oct 21st) while I reinstall the original motherboard for the server. It will probably be out from about 8am EDT until 7pm EDT although if everything goes well it should be up much sooner than that.

Hopefully this will be the last time I have to get it fixed and I won't kill it any more. I've had a replacement motherboard in for the last two weeks but it is not nearly as nice and for some reason (that I can't figure out) throttles the CPU anytime there is a significant load pushing the temperature above 60C even though the chip can handle 85C without a problem. It hits that limit with just one core going full out which of course defeats the entire purpose of the fast quad-core processor. Anyway, I'll try to keep the down time as short as possible.

Everything is back online and working like a charm.

Okay, that should be the last of the downtime for the foreseeable future. I installed a backup HD in the server and made a few other changes today but I'm done fiddling so things should be stable. Sorry about the interruptions.

Sorry the site has been down a lot recently. My kids keep turning the computer off.

The joy of children, Tom.

Will I be seeing Gral anytime soon?

Will wrote:The joy of children, Tom.

Will I be seeing Gral anytime soon?

He's there. If you scroll back far enough I've already posted his move. There wasn't anything new to post a few hours ago when I last checked.

I see him. Cool.

The site has been off-line several times in the past week. For some reason, my once stable IP address has changed twice. Each time causes all the DNS entries to be wrong and since I'm in California, I can't log into my router to see what the new one is to change it. Hopefully it has stabilized now but we'll see. If you come back and the site is not responding, that is probably the reason and I'm working on getting this issue resolved so it doesn't happen again.

Sorry about the outage again, my ISP changed my IP address once again. It's fixed now. I need to write a script to automate the update when it happens in the future.

You know Terl I admire your dedication to the game system and all that you do for the community.
Thanks

Tom/jedion357

Sorry about the ad page that some of you ended up on today (Feb 18). I was playing around with Google AdSense and it messed up my DNS entries. Everything should be back to normal by the 19th, it just takes a few hours for the DNS changes to propagate.

This is just a heads up. Over the Memorial Day weekend I'm going to be reconfiguring my network here at the house. This will probably cause a bit of disruption in access to the server for a while as I work things out. If you try to get to the site and it is not responding that is probably why. Just try back in a few hours.

If you noticed that the site was down most of the day on the 29th, I apologize. I seem to be experiencing hard drive issues with the drive that the virtual machines running this site live on. There were some bad blocks that kept causing the virtual machine to crash. They seem to be cleaned up now and everything is working again. There may be some down time again in the future as I believe I'll be replacing that hard drive.

Well, we were down all weekend (Oct 1-3) but were back up now. The main disk that the site lives on was having problems and developing bad sectors that the disk couldn't recover from. This was causing the OS to crash. I got a new disk but it took 3 days to clone the 500 GB disk onto the new one. I think the dying disk was having hardware problems and that was what caused the slow down.

In any case, things seem to back up and running smoothly. If you notice any problems let me know. There will be probably one more outage related to this as I need to still pull the old drive out of the system to send it back for warranty repair. It should be short (<30 min) and noone will probably notice.