Topics

1

Site News / Sorry About Yesterday

« on: September 21, 2007, 03:30:24 am »

It has been a while since I have posted about server issues here, but I am still around.  Last night (or was it afternoon?) the other web administrator and I upgraded from Ubuntu dapper to Ubuntu feisty, and nothing went quite right.  Either way - there should not be any other issues in the near future.  Spongezone away!

2

Site News / Downtime Today

« on: January 21, 2007, 05:46:42 am »

Sorry folks, but there is some scheduled downtime today for the server.  I cannot comment on exactly when, but it will be sometime during the early to mid afternoon.  Thanks!

3

The Waste Land / test2

« on: July 01, 2006, 10:49:09 pm »

test2

4

Site News / SMF + APC = Improvements

« on: June 30, 2006, 01:23:39 pm »

Cmonkey and the rest of the administrative gang have been doing all they can to help the move from the old boards to Simple Machines Forums.  The database error some people were receiving should not be corrected, and a new spongebob theme for the forum is in the works.

SMF has seemed very speedy to me from the beginning, but when I noticed it supported APC natively I decided to implement it.  APC stands for Alternative PHP Cache and it caches the intermediate PHP code.  This means that, when you request a page, instead of going through these steps (human-readable code > intermediate code > running script) it just does the last two (intermediate code > running script) until the source file (human-readable code) is changed.

This has sped up SMF a whole lot, changing rendering time from .1** seconds to .07* seconds.  This should cause no problems, but there is always a chance it will.  If anyone is experiencing any odd problem which have cropped up recently (today or after), PM me with the error info (if available) and I'll look into to.  Also, United SpongeBob may have been down for a few seconds here and there between 4:00PM and 4:10PM EST while APC was compiled and installed as a PHP extension.

Enjoy the new boards!

Edit by Cmonkey:  Also, happy birthday to our admin, IZ.

5

Site News / Server Move

« on: February 20, 2006, 01:55:46 pm »

The facility we have the server in is moving to a new location in Boston.  Tonight the machine will be moved around 10 PM EST and will be down for a few hours.  Hopefully most SpongeZoners will not notice anything, and Tuesday morning all will be well.

**EDIT** 12:55 AM EST

The move did not occur...  Apparently traffic was an issue.  But don't worry, it WILL happen soon enough.  I bet all of you cannot wait!

6

Site News / New Server (Will it ever end?)

« on: December 29, 2005, 08:33:32 pm »

After troubles with Layered Tech, including some substandard support and unreasonable terms of service, United SpongeBob has been transferred to a collocation facility in Boston.  

Can you imagine the horrors the administrators experienced to get the server through the endless bumper-car game Bostonians play on their roads?  It is amazing the machine and its transporters made it to the new facility in one piece.

Also, the main domain has been changed to UnitedSpongeBob.com, although SpongeZone.net remain functional.

---EDIT: 30 Seconds After Original Post ---
I did not notice Winbindd's post untill after I posted.  On the bright side, at least you can confirm my news with his, and vice versus, just to make sure it is accurate.  We could not both be wrong, now could we?

7

Site News / Spongezone Back!

« on: December 04, 2005, 08:14:32 pm »

It has been over a week, but Spongezone is finally back online.  Our hosting company, Layered Tech, decided to randomly suspend our service without notice.  We are currently looking into other solutions (most notably a collocation option) and are also trying to resolve this issue with Layered Tech.

We will have more information for you later.

8

Site News / Server Work

« on: November 20, 2005, 08:00:27 pm »

The server will be down from about 11:15 to 11:45 EST.

EDIT: 8:12 AM EST

This post was for yesterday.  All should be well now.

9

Site News / StripSlashes Server Problem

« on: October 11, 2005, 11:41:27 am »

The server running had a random daemonized process which took control of system resources, and, ultimately, caused the machine to malfunction.

It has been down for some time, and I had no way of knowing untill I checked on it today.  Sorry; everything has been fixed; life is good; enjoy the SpongeBob forums.

10

Site News / The Server Just Needs Some Lovin'

« on: August 23, 2005, 05:01:25 pm »

Sorry about the outage today. When I noticed the machine was down, I e-mailed Layered Tech (our hosting and bandwidth provider) and found out that the machine's power supply went bad. Sorry about the down time, I am unsure of when it actually went down, but once I found out about it (at 3:51 PM), they had it back up within twenty minutes, (at 4:08 PM).

So all is now well. Enjoy.

11

Computers & Video Games / Windows Vista Beta 1

« on: August 01, 2005, 01:28:23 pm »

I was able to get my hands on a copy of the huge Windows Vista download (*cough*bittorrent*cough*). Microsoft decided to only allow MSDN subscribers to see their newest release, Windows Vista Beta 1.

MSDN subscriptions are outrageouse, http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/subscribers/, so I found the download elsewhere.

Note: Windows Vista includes IE7.

I have not had the time to write my full review, but when I do I will let you'all know. For now, I will direct you to my screenshots. They are in no particular order, (for instance, the installation shots are the last ones in the gallery), but it is worth a look.

Check it out here: http://stripslashes.net/gallery2/main.php?...&g2_itemId=2389.

Although it looks nice, there are some extreme problems with it currently, ESPECIALLY with explorer version 7. Full review soon.

12

Site News / Moving. Again.

« on: July 24, 2005, 05:36:13 pm »

The website is finally moving back to its old location, 209.67.212.138.  Some people may experience a site outage as DNS cache is refreshed across ISPs (for those of you who need a translation, Google is a good place to start).  The move will officially happen at 12:00AM EST this Monday morning.

Also, any forum posts after 11:00PM EST today will not be there tomorrow.  A snapshot of the forum database will be taken at 11:00PM EST, moved, and setup for the site move at 12:00AM EST.  Thanks!  Enjoy and spongebob away!

13

Site News / What happened tonight?

« on: July 10, 2005, 09:13:41 pm »

The site was down for some time tonight as Cmonkey and I moved it from one server to another.  It will reside here for a week, until next Sunday it will be moved back to the old server.  During that week, some extreme changes will be made to the old server to accommodate for expandability.  Everything should be running fine with the exception of the chat, which will not function until the site is moved back to the old server.

14

Site News / Next Sunday The World Will Go Away

« on: June 16, 2005, 12:10:40 pm »

With the close of the school year nearing, I though I would update the UnitedSpongeBobers with some information on some of my plans for the near future.  One of the main projects I will be doing is converting this server from Debian 3.1 to Gentoo 2005.0.  This will take place next Sunday (not this Sunday but the one after).  The server will be down all of Sunday!

For the tech savy, I will be moving to an Apache 2 pre-fork install with PHP 5.0.4.

Also, I have some plans to introduce a feature that many of you may really like.  Think <yourname>@unitedspongebob.com.  More info will come after the server OS change.

15

Site News / Ruthless Delinquents

« on: June 11, 2005, 07:36:36 pm »

It seems that someone brought the SpongeZone server to its knees late today when the network was pummeled with packets in what seems to have been a DOS attack.  Anyway, the server is back up and running fine and it was down for a very short amount of time.  More investigation will be put into the cause of the server outage and precautions will be setup to help against such instances from occurring again.