Unreal-engine news is awfully slow these days (we hope E3 will help remedy that), so I guess it's time for a little editorial spew on our front page. Below, you'll get my Super Bowl pick, where the hell I've been for the past couple of months and the status of the site, including what's coming up next.
I've been away from the site more over the past couple of months than I've been in quite some time. The primary reason is that I've developed sleep apnea. What happens is basically this: my throat closes off my windpipe when I'm asleep, and I stop breathing for an extended period of time, many times per hour, all night, every night. My brain, sensing it's starving for oxygen, sends a 'jolt' to my body and wakes me up enough to start breathing again. Nasty stuff.
As a result, I haven't had a good night's sleep in well over two months. I'm sleepy every day, and don't have the energy to concentrate at work, at home, at all. While there are some things I can do medically to improve my sleep, the first course of action is to wear this hideous device on my head that pumps air through my nose into my lungs all night long. I'm simply not into that yet, so I've decided to lose weight and see how that goes.
So far, I've lost about 19 pounds in about 1 1/2 months, and things seem to be slowly improving. Hopefully, when I reach and maintain my target weight, I'll get back to sleeping normally every night.
The site has been doing very well ever since we got our new server installed, moved the forums to it and upgraded our vBulletin software to 3.06. Not only are the forums responding much, much faster now, but we have a ton more Apache processes, so we don't 'clamp' anymore when things get really busy. You might be surprised at how busy BeyondUnreal can get...
On the file mirror side of things, we have four mirrors totally re-populated, and a fifth (Gameservers.net) getting close. Once we move our web tree over completely to the new server, we won't have that problem again where our file mirrors can get totally emptied.
Our sixth mirror, TalonServers, is no longer available. Serving as a file mirror for BeyondUnreal is a daunting task, requiring a very substantial amount of bandwidth (FactoryUnreal reported that the site uses an almost constant 20 mbit/sec). Unfortunately, TalonServers just couldn't justify the investment (but we thank them for trying). If you know of a site that would like to volunteer as a file mirroring partner in exchange for BU promotion, please let me know.
Upcoming site goodness includes moving our mail services to our new server, followed soon after by webmail for all BU email accounts. We already offer superior spam protection services, ClamAV antivirus scanning and personalized service. For $12/year, you can't beat BU email, and the addition of webmail will make that value even greater.
We'll also be moving our entire web tree to the new server. The reasons for this include:
The old server is not a RAID box, so if we have a drive failure, we're cooked. The new server is RAID 5 w/hot swap, so a single drive failure can be handled very easily.
We currently utilize NFS and store our files tree on a storage server. If NFS goes down for any reason, the files tree reports empty directories, and our mirroring scripts react accordingly, deleting every single file on our mirrors. We've made some changes to help prevent this from happening, but eliminating NFS completely and storing the files on our new server is the best way to prevent this from happening again.
The new server is FAR more powerful, faster and more reliable than our old server. Additionally, we have moved to a new Linux distro on the new server, complete with the performance enhancements and security improvements that come with a massive upgrade. Simply put, BU will respond better on the new box.
Ok, now for my Super Bowl pick. I've splayed a goat, drained a chicken, and sucked the souls of my co-workers, offering them to the dark lord of football. Even though I live about 45 minutes north-west of Philadelphia, I did not allow the local frenzy to impact my pick:
Philadelphia Eagles 31 - New England Patriots 27
So let it be written, so let it be done!
I've been away from the site more over the past couple of months than I've been in quite some time. The primary reason is that I've developed sleep apnea. What happens is basically this: my throat closes off my windpipe when I'm asleep, and I stop breathing for an extended period of time, many times per hour, all night, every night. My brain, sensing it's starving for oxygen, sends a 'jolt' to my body and wakes me up enough to start breathing again. Nasty stuff.
As a result, I haven't had a good night's sleep in well over two months. I'm sleepy every day, and don't have the energy to concentrate at work, at home, at all. While there are some things I can do medically to improve my sleep, the first course of action is to wear this hideous device on my head that pumps air through my nose into my lungs all night long. I'm simply not into that yet, so I've decided to lose weight and see how that goes.
So far, I've lost about 19 pounds in about 1 1/2 months, and things seem to be slowly improving. Hopefully, when I reach and maintain my target weight, I'll get back to sleeping normally every night.
The site has been doing very well ever since we got our new server installed, moved the forums to it and upgraded our vBulletin software to 3.06. Not only are the forums responding much, much faster now, but we have a ton more Apache processes, so we don't 'clamp' anymore when things get really busy. You might be surprised at how busy BeyondUnreal can get...
On the file mirror side of things, we have four mirrors totally re-populated, and a fifth (Gameservers.net) getting close. Once we move our web tree over completely to the new server, we won't have that problem again where our file mirrors can get totally emptied.
Our sixth mirror, TalonServers, is no longer available. Serving as a file mirror for BeyondUnreal is a daunting task, requiring a very substantial amount of bandwidth (FactoryUnreal reported that the site uses an almost constant 20 mbit/sec). Unfortunately, TalonServers just couldn't justify the investment (but we thank them for trying). If you know of a site that would like to volunteer as a file mirroring partner in exchange for BU promotion, please let me know.
Upcoming site goodness includes moving our mail services to our new server, followed soon after by webmail for all BU email accounts. We already offer superior spam protection services, ClamAV antivirus scanning and personalized service. For $12/year, you can't beat BU email, and the addition of webmail will make that value even greater.
We'll also be moving our entire web tree to the new server. The reasons for this include:
The old server is not a RAID box, so if we have a drive failure, we're cooked. The new server is RAID 5 w/hot swap, so a single drive failure can be handled very easily.
We currently utilize NFS and store our files tree on a storage server. If NFS goes down for any reason, the files tree reports empty directories, and our mirroring scripts react accordingly, deleting every single file on our mirrors. We've made some changes to help prevent this from happening, but eliminating NFS completely and storing the files on our new server is the best way to prevent this from happening again.
The new server is FAR more powerful, faster and more reliable than our old server. Additionally, we have moved to a new Linux distro on the new server, complete with the performance enhancements and security improvements that come with a massive upgrade. Simply put, BU will respond better on the new box.
Ok, now for my Super Bowl pick. I've splayed a goat, drained a chicken, and sucked the souls of my co-workers, offering them to the dark lord of football. Even though I live about 45 minutes north-west of Philadelphia, I did not allow the local frenzy to impact my pick:
Philadelphia Eagles 31 - New England Patriots 27
So let it be written, so let it be done!
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