10 hour server outage

[Chris]

Most of you that visit the site often probably noticed the site was down from roughly 3pm MDT Friday until 1AM Saturday morning. This was a double set of failures. While I am moving to a new living location, the server that monitors the uptime of the SVX World Network was down and thusly not paging me to inform of the outage. Add insult to injury the SVXWN server corrupted its entire database requiring Jim to manually rebuild all the data. The cause for the failure and following kernel panic is not known at this time. We do apologize for the down time and thusly the monitoring has been re-enabled.

This being said, we have not received any money for over 6 months and the bills are stacking up. This week we will be having a dual purpose fund raiser. The initial goal is to raise $600 (or roughly $100 per month) to pay for bandwidth for June-December. Additional money above and beyond the initial goal will be directed at “hopfully” buying a new or newer server to operate off of. We have been working on some of this hardware for 5 years now and we are beginning to outgrow some of its capabilities. Another goal to achieve with a new hardware purchase will be efficiency. The amount of electricity consumed by our current server creates for a sizable power bill and generous amounts of heat to remove. We hope to move forward with a purchase of an AMD Opteron based server. This will increase speed and capability to the SVX World Network at the same time we lower power consumption and cycle the air conditioner less.

Keep you eyes open for the fundraiser as we hope most of the regulars can assist us in keeping this place going strong. As many of you that have been here for years know, how often do we really ask for this??