Work on downloads service this night

Posted on Wednesday 25 August 2010, at 20:12 UTC

This night, we are going to replace failing hard drives and add new ones to the master source of the download service.

You won't be able to modify the content of the downloads areas during the maintainance.

This shouldn't stay long, depending on how I manage to handle the heavy server and on the time used to unscrew all screws of this old and hard to modify machine ;-)

Edit 25/08/2010 02:00 UTC: Done, this was even a bit harder than expected, but everything is back online ;-)

Edit 26/08/2010 18:00 UTC: We are going to work a bit more on that this night. It seems that all SATA controllers don't support well recent 2TB disks. We need to change a bit how disks are wired so that 2TB ones are only on controllers that support them correctly.

Edit 27/08/2010 01:00 UTC: Done, everything is back online.

Edit 27/08/2010 19:00 UTC: Still not perfect, we are going to change the wiring a bit more in a few hours, that will be short.

Edit 28/08/2010 00:00 UTC: Done, everything is back online.

TuxFamily.org annual meeting

Posted on Friday 20 August 2010, at 10:08 UTC

For our French-speaking users, we will hold our annual meeting on Sunday, September 5, in Paris.

It's a great opportunity to discover how things work at TuxFamily, what is new and our problems. It'll also be an enjoyable moment, with a picnic (we'll have somewhere else to go if needed!).

Please read our invitation to our users and members (in French).

TuxFamily.org newsletter #1

Posted on Monday 2 August 2010, at 20:55 UTC

Our second newsletter is out!

It'll keep you informed of what's happening here at TuxFamily: two new services, a new project, what we do in real life, and lots of updated statistics.

TuxFamily.org's newsletter #1 (in French).

VHFFS Database down

Posted on Sunday 4 July 2010, at 16:35 UTC

The server which is currently hosting the VHFFS database crashed.

All related services are down, which are mx1,pop,imap,ns1.

The server will be rebooted tomorrow in the morning, stay tuned ;-)

Edit: Good news, everything is back online ! ;)

Servers upgrade this night

Posted on Saturday 5 June 2010, at 23:55 UTC

A recent power outage is always a good opportunity to do kernel upgrades.

So, let's upgrade everything, there will be short service outages in the next hours ;-)

Edit: Done!

Hardware maintenance this night

Posted on Friday 4 June 2010, at 23:39 UTC

This night, we are going to switch to new power feeds.

You can expect an outage of most of our services (excepted failsafe services such as mx2/ns2) at any time starting... NOW :)

It shouldn't take long, please bear with us.

Edit: Done!, thank to the STS there wasn't any outage at all ;-)

Power outage

Posted on Wednesday 28 April 2010, at 04:30 UTC

This night, we had a power outage in our rack, yep, again, everything is back online.

Please bear with us.

Power outage

Posted on Thursday 22 April 2010, at 11:02 UTC

This night, we had a power outage in our rack, everything were back online a few tens of minutes later, however we need to do some urgent maintainance on one of our storage server. Stay tuned ;-)

Edit: Done, everything is back online !

Need funds, adding innovative ads to websites planned

Posted on Thursday 1 April 2010, at 00:12 UTC

Dear hosted,

Last July, we were alerting you about the difficulties TuxFamily is facing: lack of volunteers, financial difficulties. In a one-year-gap, the global volume of data has doubled. We host new, very dynamic projects, like Vikidia, and olders still active, like XMoto. The traffic is also increasing exponentially.

Thus, the board of directors and administrators of TuxFamily.org have begun an introspection in order to guarantee the sustainability of the hosting platform. This introspection is made even more urgent it appears essential to buy web servers in the short run to replace those currently used, which reach today saturation point.

We have immediately rejected the idea of billing the service, so have we for large ad banners on our hosted sites. It seemed to us we needed to work to a fun and discrete solution, both enjoyable and profitable.

A proposal has emerged, that has been adopted unanimously. It consists into embracing progressively an "advertising cursor". Our hosted' visitors would then get, in place of the dull, old-school cursor, the picture of a funny, appealing cute kitten.

This initiative will be effective on every web site in about 15 days. It's already available on some volontary websites :

• http://www.tuxfamily.org (obviously)
• http://www.vhffs.org (likewise)
• http://www.qelectrotech.org (warm thanks to the author)
• http://www.poudreverte.org
• http://faq.tuxfamily.org
• http://forum.tuxfamily.org

Elaborated with a specialized partner in animal-food, it's a win-win : TuxFamily expects a wonderful financial ROI and we expect, for our hosted projects, an increase of long-depth visits, related to the tenderness and sweetness that will emerge from your web sites.

Technically, we will use a transparent-proxy that will modify HTML files on-the-fly in order to add the "ad cursor".

We invite our hosted projects that would like to enable it immediately to take benefit of this service and then avoid any compatibility problem to just send us a mail.

TuxFamily.org team

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)

Short storage maintenance this night

Posted on Tuesday 23 March 2010, at 22:05 UTC

This night, we are going to work on our main storage server, mainly kernel upgrade, this shouldn't take long ;-).

Edit: Done ;)