SVXWN is a wonder site!!!!

[Hocrest]

So there have been some storms to the north and to the south of me tonight. And it seems that most of the the intraweb is borked. XT6 is unattainable, so is USMB, GRM, about 4 corporate sites that I was doing job searches on, even Google is working at about 10%.

BUT.... The SVXWN is running like it always does. www.God must know how important this place is to me

[ensteele]

He aims to please, and so do we.

[Chris]

And for what its worth, in our upgrade purchases we got for cheap on Ebay, 2 matched Cisco Arrowpoint Content Switches/load balancers. If we can get a sponsor at a data center somewhere on the east coast with just a bit of bandwidth, we can multi-home the SVX World Network. What this means is that should someone sponsor us a location we can co-locate our current server after the migration to the new one, we can re-allocate the server as a slave server behind two load balancers on two sides of the continent. This would be similar to a small version of what Akami does for companies like Yahoo and Microsoft.

A set up like this means that when you went to www.subaru-svx.net the load balancers would answer the request and determine what location would serve the SVXWN pages to you best, then forward your http request to the appropriate server/location.

SO.... If anyone has the ability to sponsor some server space on the east coast with roughly a 1-1.5 megs of burstable bandwidth, please PM me. Please understand that the actual usage is much less than 1.5 meg under the 95th percentile rule, we just like the ceiling space for speed and performance reasons. If a 4u or 6u server is too big, I will personally sponsor a small 1u server if the deal is right.

Some people think my team and I over engineer things. But if it was your kid, would you not try to provide the best for them? The SVXWN started as a hobby and offer to replace the annoying Yahoo issues. After 1 year of operations, it started to have a responsibility to it as it grew. I replaced the startup server after the 1 year mark and we have survived well on the current server with a technology build date of 1998. A few surgeries have kept the machine in what I consider better than average health. So, if I have the opportunity to over engineer again at a major milestone, I will. And out operations should take us into the next decade when the service will be most valuable to owners needing to sell, make, trade, and organize parts replacements for their no-longer-supported cars.

Imagine the ability to take an entire location down for server upgrades or software changes and all the traffic being routed automatically to the still running slave node on the other side of the country. Then when the upgrade is completed, bring it online and down the second location to do the same work a second time. Again with no down time and completely invisible to you the users.

I wont mention names, but there are other car sites out there I know you all frequent. Some Subaru related, some not. How do we compare to them in uptime? How often do you try to come here and the site is down? With the new system there will even be a test site published for all the users to see. This can be used to see if indeed the server is down, if administrators have acknowledged the issue, ETA for a return, and to even test if the issue is the SVXWN server or broken internet somewhere between you and the data center. If only my SVX got as much time, money, and attention as I put into making sure this place still has gas and a heartbeat.

[RSVX]

The will also be a development server, where I get to play with all of the proposed upgrades, and test them for functionality/stability. This way we can really start to customize our world. The donation icons were a first glimpse of things to come.