2021 fundraiser - new server

[incrediblehark]

Been a lurker for a while, and don't post much but happy to help! Forums seem to be a dying breed, and I much prefer them to newer alternatives as I'm too old to get into them nowadays. This site is a wealth of information, Most gamers get a lot out of what the community here brings with all of their knowledge.

Hey, maybe all of these content creators with patreons on youtube should chip in considering they're most likely reciting info from here in their videos.

[orange808]

Sent. Better late than never. Thank you for everything, system11.

[finisherr]

Have you considered DigitalOcean instead of AWS? Much cheaper for something this simple.

[system11]

I'll certainly look into it and see. One of the biggest spanners is turning out to be operating system since Redhat have essentially killed CentOS.

I found tonight that the backlash has been so huge that they're offering free small scale production use under their 'developer' program so I'm signing up for that as we speak. You have to start paying for support and access to their solutions sections but that's fine, I don't need them and even if I did I .. have access via works corporate account anyway I just can't go tagging personal non-work systems to it.

[finisherr]

I'll certainly look into it and see. One of the biggest spanners is turning out to be operating system since Redhat have essentially killed CentOS.

I found tonight that the backlash has been so huge that they're offering free small scale production use under their 'developer' program so I'm signing up for that as we speak. You have to start paying for support and access to their solutions sections but that's fine, I don't need them and even if I did I .. have access via works corporate account anyway I just can't go tagging personal non-work systems to it.

You can probably get away with DigitalOcean's standard droplets and just pick a size that works for you. It's probably the cheapest VM you can get that isn't total dogshit in terms of reliability. As for CentOS deprecation, yeah, that sucks. However, if whatever you're running provides Debian packages to install the software you should be good to run things on Ubuntu. Feel free to HMU in a DM if you could use a hand with anything. I'd probably get a migration plan in place to move off of CentOS since that's going to be a dead end by the end of the year anyway.

[system11]

Oh god I'm never going near Ubuntu again. I had to deal with that at work years ago, I built an automated deployment system for laptops and everything was a pain including them regularly being bricked by patches. Since reinstall typically requires server swapout in this instance it needs to be something with really long legs too. RHEL8 gives 2029, by which time SuperMegaCovid 2.0 Turbo+ [Mongolia Label] will have wiped us all out.

[finisherr]

LoL. Ubuntu is the dominant OS distribution in the data center today, but whatever works : )

[Dildaria]

I've been a lurker of the board for a while. I'm happy to have contributed.

[Thomago]

Late to the party, but: done.

[boula]

Late to the party, but: done.

[xeos]

Sorry to hear the bills are so high - although I have no experience with a site of this scale, I have used pair.com for 20 years and they are really top-notch and have never raised my price since 1998 when I signed up. Certainly worth a look, IMHO.

in terms of monthly contributions, consider flattr.com, which at the moment is very easy to use and has zero fees (can't imagine that lasts forever, but it's a nice perk).

[system11]

Thanks everyone - I will be closing this thread up shortly (this weekend in between marathon Joshi wrestling watching) and posting the many thanks as far as I can. Not everyone made it clear who they are and whether they did or didn't want to be mentioned.

I never really wanted to look at patreon/regular funding type arrangements - I'm not someone who likes asking for money, it's deeply uncomfortable.

I think I've found the right model and spec to replace it with, enough was donated to look at a DL360 Gen 9 with the low power drain CPU family (this makes a big difference to ongoing costs over the 'standard' CPU options), instead of the Gen 8 I'd been expecting to be shopping for. The HP DL series are from experience personally and at work, are about as bulletproof as it gets. I realise I have just cursed the current one. Sticking point is disks, sellers are mostly stripping them now and they're more expensive than they used to be. I'm scanning ebay every few days waiting for someone who isn't a recycling place to post one that's still populated at a good price, I know they exist having seen some sold listings. These things have loads of bays, at least one hot spare is mandatory.

Also the old forum code is now running on a virtual Redhat 8 machine for testing with new versions of all the pre-requisites, it's kind of hacky but "working" - I haven't been able to work on migration testing for the forum software upgrade part because my home machine doesn't have enough oomph behind it. Funny side note the database is too big for it to even prune without timing out My 'good' laptop is in pieces as it broke a few months ago....

[poipo32]

I just donated a small amount, I hope it helps a bit.

Instead of a Patreon, you could set up a funding page on this website with a progress bar showing of much of the cost for the year or month has been donated.
Since you don't like asking for money, you could even set it up to hide the donation link when/if the goal is reached.

For the CentOS replacement, I've been testing AlmaLinux, it is intended to be a drop in replacement, and it has worked well for my uses.
There are other CentOS replacement projects, like Rocky Linux, which I've heard good things about but haven't tried.

[xeos]

This is probably going way out of your comfort zone but have you considered small-scale sponsorship? I'd think VGP etc might be interested in running a small ad for their "official" OSSC build. There's a lot of space in the header up there for a 200x200 pixel sponsorship ad and if it were just a static png + link it would be a minimal extra bandwidth/complexity and no "privacy" concerns. I personally would have zero problem with that kind of thing, I'd probably even click on it when the item was of interest...

[philsublime]

Is this closed now?

[vol.2]

Did you try the link in the first post?

[philsublime]

Link worked, thanks

[Mad Grab]

Donated……Thanks for your service and all the work!

[system11]

Sorry, I've been distracted with family matters a bit too.

So - first of all, thanks for the outpouring of support. Seriously, I can't say how much I appreciate people sparing a bit of money to help the place out. 83 donations were received, the amount donated is enough to:

1) Buy the spec of server I wanted
2) Pay for warrantied disks (this was one of the larger issues now that people are stripping them even in warranty before sale)
3) Cover the logistics (delivery etc)
4) Dent the ongoing hosting bills

The fundraiser is now closed. I would love to highlight a couple of the donations but as I said before I'm very conscious that some people are able to help much more than others - so I'll just leave that detail as "you know who you are".

I would like to thank the following people who indicated their names in the donation comments (aside from those who wanted to remain anonymous):

BareKnuckleRoo
Bloodhawk
Bratwurst
BuckoA51
charlizardon
CIT
Dildaria
DirkSwizzler
Dochartaigh
Emperoring
FUDOH
incrediblehark
Kid Aphex
Koa Zo
L-Train
Mad Grab
Marc
marus
MintyTheCat
muggsy
parodius
poipo32
rhetoricalnoise
Some Mist
sparky
speedy
STGAlmond
Vexorg
woodcans
z80

If I have missed anyone who had wanted to see their name here then please contact me as fixing it is the least I can do.