Earthblot’s irc1 server has been updated.  It’s now running on a 3.2 GHz with 2 GB RAM–up from 2.4 GHz and 512 MB. Its main purpose is still as a local file server.

Unfortunately one of the RAID drives is either in the process of failing or the wire is broken–it’s caused some problems that I’ve been unable to pinpoint so far.  We’ll see what happens.  IRC shouldn’t be affected as much, as it does not rely on the hard-drives, but the website and other services may have trouble if the array goes down.

The Earthblot maintenance scheduled for early February has been canceled due to the delay of Intel’s quad-core 45-nm processors.  It will be rescheduled whenever more information is available.

The website has undergone a pretty major upgrade and is now based on Wordpress.  I did my best to rewrite my home-made theme into a Wordpress-compatible theme; if you find any bugs, please leave a comment.  It seems to validate fine on XHTML 4.01 Transitional, which means there shouldn’t be too many bugs.

It takes a little longer to load the pages, but I think the added functionality is worth it.

The main Earthblot server, irc1.earthblot.net, will likely be going down for big maintenance sometime around the 5th of February, 2008. Estimated downtime should be just a few hours while the server moves to new hardware. The system currently hosts the Earthblot website, IRC server, IRC services, an SQL server, and a mailserver, along with several local network services such as a fileserver. I’ll be moving most of these systems to new hardware and upgrading the current hardware. We’re also looking at a kernel recompile and a full system format, as far as I can foresee. The details are tentative and could change at any point as I am still deciding exactly how I’d like everything to work.

We’re also looking at modifying the main network closet. Currently it gets rather warm, having two computers, several batteries and a large number of switches and routers, and no airflow is available. I don’t currently have a plan to fix the airflow issue, but I plan to build shelves for the servers so that they are at least not on the floor.

Small site upgrade; it should use a little less bandwidth and load faster now. I’m clocking around 4 seconds for the first page, then about 1 for the rest.

Wow, it’s been a relatively long time since there’s been any news here! We’re still here and working fine…we might be acquiring a new link sometime soon, too. In case anyone wanders here wondering, both Lostmoment and Earthblot are currently undergoing slight maintenance to upgrade server and install new networking equipment.

I’m expecting an extended downtime period sometime late next week for irc1.earthblot.net, which will probably last two hours or so.

Well, okay, so now we’ve linked with Lostmoment as well. Seems we’re really progressing along. I don’t have a lot of time to write right now, so I’ll just go over the basics. We’re not changing our name or anything, and neither is Lostmoment. It’s just a merge–which means we’re linked, but we’re still completely separate networks…or whatever. I dunno. However you want to look at it.

We’ve done some more tweaking and it appears the servers are happily linked right now. They’ve split a few times but I think we’ve got it mostly fixed.

In any case, I updated the Policies and Staff pages, as well as added links to them on the right. I’m pretty sure not many people knew about them to begin with, but the policies page was linked from /rules…so you can’t complain.

Alright, ‘irc.earthblot.net’ now points to both irc1.earthblot.net and irc2.earthblot.net–it is using load balancing from DNS. I suggest not connecting specifically to irc1.earthblot.net or irc2.earthblot.net anymore.

The server link is complete. The network is now accessible from irc2.earthblot.net as well as its regular irc.earthblot.net. It might be worth it to connect to the new server instead of the old one, since it’ll probably have a little less lag for a while, until the number of users on each server reaches an equilibrium.