ADMIN: Upgrade Update

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TCP)]

A short (heard *that* before??) status report on the upgrade ...

The T1 is operational, however we're running into some problems
with the routers. Having exhausted plans A-C, I'm off to the hardware
store tomorrow morning to purchase a larger hammer. We should be
up and running on the new link early Saturday afternoon (GMT-7).
We will also have an additional disk drive dedicated to the FTP
archives (software, bulletins, ARRL mirror, etc.), thanks to a Paul
Dunphy (VE1DX).  The Internet nameservers have the new IP address
for the system. You might see a pause when trying to connect due
to your system trying the other address first (we'll only be live
on one at any given time). For the impatient, the new (fast) address
is 207.102.83.9 -- hopefully operational tomorrow afternoon.

Not wanting to have a dull weekend, I decided to completely reinstall
the machine's operating system as well. We've been having no end
of problems over the last few weeks due to an attempted upgrade
that just plain fell over. The new OS (the latest snapshot release
of FreeBSD-current) is working fine, however some of the applications
software will require a recompilation. If you notice any breakage,
please be patient. If it's still broken after Monday, tickle my
mailbox and I will look into the problem.

I'm still looking for people to help out with some of the programming
tasks. If you're interested in helping out, please send me some
e-mail, and (more importantly) get subscribed to the
"futures@ve7tcp.ampr.org" list. (This particular announcement is
going to get louder and louder as time goes on ...)

Once the side effects from the current upgrade have worked themselves
out I will be installing a brand new server. This afternoon I
totalled up the (huge!) pile of contributions. After adding it all
up (three times!) I could only come to the conclusion that all of
you have contributed a total of CAN$3000 towards the system! This
is absolutely incredible! I can't thank everyone enough for the
show of support!

Since we haven't yet been able to nail down a suitable replacement
for the mailing list software, I'm currently leaning towards putting
most of the money into hardware upgrades. The $3K will cover the
cost of a 100 MHz Pentium with 2GB of disk and 16 MB of RAM. To
that we can add an additional 1.5 GB of disk + 16 MB of RAM from
the existing server. With Paul's disk donation I'm looking at taking
the existing system and turning it into an outbound "mail exploder"
for the mailing lists. This combination should do wonders for
response time for both the mailing lists and the web pages. If you
have ideas on how to allocate the resources, get on the "futures"
list.

Finally, Marvin has asked me to thank you for all the fan mail you
have been sending his way. Unfortunately he has been too grumpy to
respond directly. Something about going off and soaking his head
in a bucket of water ...   Maybe you'll find him on the 14313 list
:-)

--lyndon (not working the WPX this weekend :-{  )


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