I think it’s safe to say that we’re back in business. Something of a perfect storm of events happened late last week. The MySQL server went down and I got some new hardware in to tinker with the server. Since the server went down, I decided to re-work a few things and try out something new. I think I like it, but as usual not everything is working 100% things will slowly get back up to speed over the coming days…I hope.
I thought that I had everything worked out, but it seems like there are still issues with the new server. There was a power blip this morning. For realz, half a second of no power to restart everything (apparently the server is not plugged into the UPS, I should fix that). The server started up perfectly fine, but the shared folders within the VMs didn’t mount properly. I thought it was something I could remote into and fix but there was something else wrong and I needed to wait until I got home from work to fix it.
Ugh, never a dull moment here.
Hey guys. I have no idea what happened to the site while I was gone. Being that I was completely without internet for 95% of my trip, I couldn’t check anything. The few times I did have internet, I wasn’t sure if it was my connection or if it was the site itself. Alaska is spotty. Oh well, those are the perils of hosting your own server.
On the Alaska front, I made it back, I’m alive, and I’m going through photos as we speak. It will be some time, I was gone for 4 weeks after all, but fear not, you should have some beautiful photos to see soon enough!
I’ve been working on the server the past few days, it might not work, it might work, be prepared.
That is all.
Sorry about that unexpected downtime. I was working on some stuff on the server and kinda just decided it was time to update it all. Oops.
Anyway, we should be back to our regularly scheduled posting this weekend. Still got a few more configs to set up and stuff, but for the most part, you average users should be able to see everything.
I’ve recently updated the server, and in the process have probably broken more then a few things
This is the UPS tracking confirmation for the server parts. Awesome.
So, you may or may not have noticed, but the site was down for about 10 mins a couple times in the past few days. I know the issue, unfortunately I wont be able to fix it for a few days. My router is being all stupid and dropping the connection at seemingly random times, and the only way to fix it is to power cycle the router.
I ordered a new router, it should be here soon, hopefully that will fix things.
Yes, i also know I can fix it with putting DD WRT on it, but I don’t have the time to flash it now, since my router is a WRT54Gv8 which has no memory to flash to, and is a pain in the ass to set up.
Anyway, everything will work out, dont worry.
Well, remember the ~20U server rack we made 2 years ago? It’s still one of our most popular stories, and one of the most searched for terms that lands people here. Well, Jeremy decided to take our plans to heart and build his own 40U version of it. He painted in black, and made it nicer then ours. (In our defense, we’ve improved it a bit since 2 years ago).
Jeremy has many photos of the build at his Picasa Web Albums space. And a walk through of how he did it, the cost, and all that sort of stuff over here at dual boxing.
As you can see, his server rack is much taller then ours, but, he used that same methods to build it as we did:
He also had some help from his pets, and, it looks like he did not follow our instructions to the letter, because he forgot step 5c, play Geometry Wars, but that’s ok, we’ll forgive him for that. 
And here is the final rack, full of 6 nice computers. He says that there is one good one in that rack that is his main computer, and the other 5 are support. Support for what? Well, playing multiple characters in online games. That is intense. Testing code out is something he also does with those computers.
No matter what he uses them for, they are much nicer now then they probably were a few months ago, and that’s all that matters in the end. Good job Jeremy, good job.