The Gang Garrison 2 Forum
Gang Garrison Discussion => Announcements => Topic started by: MedO on February 06, 2013, 08:00:48 am
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Hi everyone.
We have some serious downtime coming up in a bit over a month. No date yet, but we can't really avoid it without risking serious security issues.
Our trusty server still uses Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and the support for this release will run out soon, so we need to upgrade to something newer. However, we can't just use Ubuntu's normal upgrade path since the virtual server environment is quite tightly integrated with the host and management stuff at our hoster. This means the way forward is to let them copy a new system image to our server.
Unfortunately at the moment they still have Ubuntu 10.04 as the newest Ubuntu version, which means we would be in the same place again in just two years (with 12.04 we'd have four years of peace). However, since we have to re-install all the things anyway, we could just as well move to a different hoster altogether. I've been pretty happy with Host Europe in the past, but they have some silly restrictions (no IRC services) and we sometimes get these mysterious performance issues that make our forums grind to a halt... besides, Host Europe have not lowered their prices or improved their offers for a bit now, so it might pay off to look for a better offer now. If we want to change, this is also the only time of the year where we can do that, since our contract always runs for a full year.
So, if you find a good offer please post it here. We currently use the L offer from here:
http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/ (http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/)
...except that we only seem to get 1-2GB of RAM at the moment, so they didn't pass that improvement on to us yet.
What I'm looking for is a server with at least 30GB of HD space, 1GB of RAM guaranteed and at least 2TB of traffic/month. More is always better of course, if we e.g. want to run a Minecraft server some time then we can use all the RAM we can get :P
I also don't insist on continuing to host the forums myself, so if someone else is interested and trusted by the community it would be something to consider. It could be an improvement to legal security as well because of the rather strict German laws.
Anyway, all this will probably mean a longish downtime unless we can keep using the old system while setting up the new one. We'll see.
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Inb4 Ajf takes over and turns the site into some kind of cyborg
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WELCOME TO AJF GARRISON 2 FORUMS
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Oh I should mention, we'll probably roll a new forum software while we're at it. The most obvious candidate is SMF2, but if you have other suggestions I'll be happy to hear them as well.
AJF already brought up FluxBB. We're not limited to PHP solutions, but if there is a converter from SMF data that would be a plus.
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I'm also looking at MyBB, a friend's forum uses it.
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OK so MyBB looks really, really nice.
Andrea: there is a specific db package I had in mind
Andrea: I just need to find it again
Andrea: oh, it WAS MyBB
Andrea: it has some interesting features
Andrea: for example, custom moderation tools(!)
Andrea: lets you create a tool that does a bunch of mod things at once
http://www.mybb.com/features/administration (http://www.mybb.com/features/administration) - look at dat admin panel, it actually looks reasonably easy to use
http://www.mybb.com/features/threads (http://www.mybb.com/features/threads) - THREAD PREFIXES
http://www.mybb.com/features/reputation (http://www.mybb.com/features/reputation) - POST RATING
http://www.mybb.com/features/warning (http://www.mybb.com/features/warning) - warning history
http://www.mybb.com/features/tasks (http://www.mybb.com/features/tasks) - task scheduling
http://www.mybb.com/features/plugin-system (http://www.mybb.com/features/plugin-system) - hooks and plugin system
http://www.mybb.com/features/moderation (http://www.mybb.com/features/moderation) - delayed moderation
http://www.mybb.com/features/calendar (http://www.mybb.com/features/calendar) - forum calendar
Plus everything SMF does, I think.
Yes it has a conversion tool for SMF.
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but who doesn't love SMF ;_;
myBB looks nice though, like not a total overhaul
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but who doesn't love SMF ;_;
myBB looks nice though, like not a total overhaul
All PHP forums look the same.
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http://www.forum-software.org/forum-reviews (http://www.forum-software.org/forum-reviews) - I've seen some good ones.. MyBB looks sexy.
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Inb4 Ajf takes over and turns the site into some kind of cyborg
and then drops it after a week
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SMF is by far the only forum software I'm completely comfortable with.
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Inb4 Ajf takes over and turns the site into some kind of cyborg
and then drops it after a week
I don't drop things this big.
SMF is by far the only forum software I'm completely comfortable with.
Me too, but I also hate SMF.
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SMF2 is pretty good once you figure out how to make the theme more like this one.
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As long as we can keep this theme and stuff, I'm happy.
Also, we deliberately got rid of reputation a while ago, that's not a feature we need (just mentioning this because ajf listed it in MyBBs features).
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As long as we can keep this theme and stuff, I'm happy.
Also, we deliberately got rid of reputation a while ago, that's not a feature we need (just mentioning this because ajf listed it in MyBBs features).
post rep is interesting though
and I'd probably get rid of this theme but restyle the default SMF2 or MyBB theme. Either way, we can't keep the existing one exactly, since it would be incompatible.
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MyBB is a confusing pile of shit, stick with SMF please
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^
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As long as we can keep this theme and stuff, I'm happy.
Also, we deliberately got rid of reputation a while ago, that's not a feature we need (just mentioning this because ajf listed it in MyBBs features).
post rep is interesting though
and I'd probably get rid of this theme but restyle the default SMF2 or MyBB theme. Either way, we can't keep the existing one exactly, since it would be incompatible.
No, but please don't get rid of the color palette or the general look, because I like them quite a lot (more than other forums).
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MyBB is a confusing pile of shit, stick with SMF please
Hmm, could you elaborate on that?
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I always liked PhpBB
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PHPBB is a security nightmare
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I don't really want to humor the visions for the forum you have that you're pushing on us when SMF is perfectly fine but
MyBB doesn't have the nifty ass package manager
MyBB's default theme is cluttered and ass
Admin panel on SMF way better
SMF has a better and more extensive modifications library and community (plus we lose most functionality of the various modifications we've installed for this forum when they pretty much all get retained by upgrading SMF since cross-version compatibility is rarely an issue)
SMF 2 is straightforward, easy to use and what everyone is comfortable with
Post rep is stupid, and shit we've already had
We don't need moderation tools when nobody here does their job needs them
I don't agree with trying fix something thats not broken because it looks pretty and has a bunch of useless tools
comes down to design/aesthetic options (myBB) vs. security (SMF)
>>>thread rating
>>>>myBB
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I always liked PhpBB
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Admin panel on SMF way better
Is it? I've used SMF2's, since I run another forum for a private community completely unrelated to the other stuff I do.
The admin panel isn't really that nice, but to be fair, MyBB's could well be worse, I haven't tried it.
SMF has a better and more extensive modifications library and community (plus we lose most functionality of the various modifications we've installed for this forum when they pretty much all get retained by upgrading SMF since cross-version compatibility is rarely an issue)
Any particular modifications we'd lose that MyBB lacks?
SMF 2 is straightforward, easy to use and what everyone is comfortable with
It's familiar, sure, but not the easiest thing. The menu structures still confuse me.
Post rep is stupid, and shit we've already had
Fair point.
We don't need moderation tools when nobody here does their job needs them
OK.
I don't agree with trying fix something thats not broken because it looks pretty and has a bunch of useless tools
It's not a case of that, it's a case of "We need to migrate to new forum software, do we use SMF2 or maybe try something else?"
comes down to design/aesthetic options (myBB) vs. security (SMF)
Is myBB actually less secure? I thought SMF was known to be bad at this stuff.
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SMF was a-or-the beacon of "decent security" in freeware PHP based category-list-forums for a long time. It had a rut at the end of SMF1's lifetime, but it's pretty good again, now.
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if we change hosts, does that mean i can post kitten flags again?
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Only if the eventual one isn't German.
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bring back random chatter 2013
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Yeah lets give the useless fucks a reason to stay here! YES WE CAN
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Personally this is the first forum I can recall being on that used SMF and I prefer it a by a HUGE margin to basically any other forum system I've seen(myBB, InvisionFree, etc).
Post rep is stupid, and shit we've already had
are you saying a system where people would bookmark the link to downvote people just to fuck with them might have been horrible and flawed
We don't need moderation tools when nobody here does their job needs them
I do the same amount of moderation as half the mods combined so yeah I agree with this.
I thought about applying to be a mod once but that's only because someone told me there's funny conversations in the mod subforum and now I want to read them.
design/aesthetic options (myBB)
frankly I think myBB looks ugly as balls
PHPBB is a security nightmare
HOLY SHIT NO WAY SOMETHING WITH PHP HAS SECURITY FLAWS
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PHPBB is more of a security nightmare than any of the other PHP forum softwares.
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Personally this is the first forum I can recall being on that used SMF and I prefer it a by a HUGE margin to basically any other forum system I've seen(myBB, InvisionFree, etc).
I like SMF a lot, too.
Post rep is stupid, and shit we've already had
are you saying a system where people would bookmark the link to downvote people just to fuck with them might have been horrible and flawed
We don't need moderation tools when nobody here does their job needs them
I do the same amount of moderation as half the mods combined so yeah I agree with this.
I thought about applying to be a mod once but that's only because someone told me there's funny conversations in the mod subforum and now I want to read them.
ok
design/aesthetic options (myBB)
frankly I think myBB looks ugly as balls
ok
PHPBB is a security nightmare
HOLY SHIT NO WAY SOMETHING WITH PHP HAS SECURITY FLAWS
php is shit
but easy
hence it attracts newbs
who write software that is shit but not easy
and since it's shit, it's also horribly insecure
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Here's a few other forums I go to, if you wanted to compare forums.
Zandronum forums use myBB. (It's cluttered as all fuck) (http://zandronum.com/forum/)
Doomworld forums use vBulletin. (There doesn't seem to be a lot of cool things you can do with it tho.) (http://doomworld.com/vb/)
MalwareUp II uses PhpBB (Looks nice and shiny) (http://malwareup.org/)
CQFF uses SMF 2 (The software we all know and love) (http://www.chexquest.org/)
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We could always just use the IRC during downtime
Either go to Espernet or download an IRC client and connect to irc.esper.net:6667. I prefer the latter for reasons.
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We could always just use the IRC during downtime
Either go to Espernet or download an IRC client and connect to irc.esper.net:6667. I prefer the latter for reasons.
For the former you meant to say webIRC right
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I still remember ACMLMboard
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I still remember ACMLMboard
is that the one where posting gives you XP and lets you level up? I remember an old Pokemon forum I went to a long time ago that might have used that, I thought it was really neat. unnecessary, but neat.
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I still remember ACMLMboard
is that the one where posting gives you XP and lets you level up? I remember an old Pokemon forum I went to a long time ago that might have used that, I thought it was really neat. unnecessary, but neat.
soooooooooooo
just ranks?
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http://jul.rustedlogic.net/ (http://jul.rustedlogic.net/)
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cluttered as hell
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if we e.g. want to run a Minecraft server some time
somtime in the distant future we can host official gg2 servers and alot of them
pygg2 if that ever comes into existence.
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So, if you find a good offer please post it here. We currently use the L offer from here:
http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/ (http://www.hosteurope.de/Server/Virtual-Server/)
...except that we only seem to get 1-2GB of RAM at the moment, so they didn't pass that improvement on to us yet.
What I'm looking for is a server with at least 30GB of HD space, 1GB of RAM guaranteed and at least 2TB of traffic/month. More is always better of course, if we e.g. want to run a Minecraft server some time then we can use all the RAM we can get :P
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing) offers $10/mo. 1GB RAM, 30GB SSD HD, 2TB bandwidth VPS
Is that enough? Would I need to go higher, $20/mo.?
On that note, how much money do you get for server upkeep, typically? :P
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I've always had a hard time finding offers better than HostEurope. Is it because hosting is more expensive in the US, or am I just not looking hard enough?
Also, are we paying 13 euros a month like the website says?
Whoever ends up hosting the server in the future, multiple *trusted* people should have access. Heaven forbid one person experiences a death in the family or some other personal emergency, we should be able to keep the website running in their absence. Higher bus factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) and all that.
Maybe we can use only free servers to host the website. We could farm all php execution out to a bunch of Travis-CI jobs. Loading "/forums" tells nginx to trigger a commit to Github, which triggers a Travis-CI build which renders the forum page. Any SQL updates are committed back to Github as flat files.
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I've always had a hard time finding offers better than HostEurope. Is it because hosting is more expensive in the US, or am I just not looking hard enough?
Also, are we paying 13 euros a month like the website says?
Whoever ends up hosting the server in the future, multiple *trusted* people should have access. Heaven forbid one person experiences a death in the family or some other personal emergency, we should be able to keep the website running in their absence. Higher bus factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) and all that.
Maybe we can use only free servers to host the website. We could farm all php execution out to a bunch of Travis-CI jobs. Loading "/forums" tells nginx to trigger a commit to Github, which triggers a Travis-CI build which renders the forum page. Any SQL updates are committed back to Github as flat files.
IIRC you still have access to the server for that reason... not root access, but enough to maintain the forums and website and to pull the forum db.
I don't have an easy time finding a better hoster either. Yes, we're at 13 Eur/Month, plus whatever mrfredman still pays for the domain at 1and1. Would probably stay with HostEurope aka the devil we know, if it wasn't for lack of up-to-date Ubuntu distro. Seriously, 12.04 is still not available?
Will look into Digital Ocean.
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On that note, how much money do you get for server upkeep, typically? :P
I didn't check in a while, but reading back a bit it looks like I've been paying it out of my own pocket since May 2012. I "donated" May-July, but didn't get any new money after that either (and I always paid part of it myself anyway). mrfredman probably has some (he gets the donations), but I doubt it's a significant ammount.
Since it doesn't look like mrfredman will have a big comeback soon, we might want to transfer the domain to someone else too and change the paypal donate account...
Edit: I see that I marked down March 22 as the last possible date for this, probably because we'll have to cancel our contract by then if we want to switch hosts.
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Sooo, today I did some researchy things and found out that we can get a server for the same price as on HE from DE.Punkt, and they have newer Ubuntus too: https://www.de-punkt.de/vserver.html (https://www.de-punkt.de/vserver.html)
We could have one for significantly cheaper from them (9 Eur instead of 13) if we only take 1GiB of RAM though, which might be worth considering. I also like that they apparently don't bind you for a year at a time, but on the other hand I find it difficult to get in-depth information about their offers (e.g. what this "Fair Flat" traffic option actually means... Host Europe defines the limits very clearly (and generously).
On the HostEurope side of things, it is very probable that we can get one of the new servers with 2GiB of RAM for the same price once we switch to a new OS, and maybe they'll switch us over sooner, too (they did that once before). I searched around a bit for information on when they will have Ubuntu 12.04 available, and they tentatively say Q1 2013, so there is hope yet. It's still weird that it would take them so long, though.
Next offer: Hetzner. http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix (http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix)
They look much more professional than DE.Punkt, but also more expensive. Our customary 13 Eur/Month would buy us 1GiB of RAM and 40GiB of HD space and a 2TB traffic limit, though after the 2TB we'd still not pay more and only get throttled to 10MBit/s. There doesn't seem to be any automatic backup included (you can buy it for 5 Eur/Month extra).
Digital Ocean... They look interesting. Their website is too big-soft-button-y for my taste, but the prices look good and they do include backups in the deal. The 99.99% uptime guarantee is nice, but I'm not sure how realistic it is - and the only thing you get if they don't uphold it is a refund for the hourly hosting cost if I understand correctly, so if they don't manage to keep below the one hour per year downtime and keep us down for an entire day instead, they'd refund us 36 cents (on the smaller package). Anyway, I might set up an account with them for testing.
Edit: Oh yes, I should mention: Currently I'm leaning toward staying with Host Europe, but looking into Digital Ocean as well.
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Next offer: Hetzner. http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix (http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix)
They look much more professional than DE.Punkt, but also more expensive. Our customary 13 Eur/Month would buy us 1GiB of RAM and 40GiB of HD space and a 2TB traffic limit, though after the 2TB we'd still not pay more and only get throttled to 10MBit/s. There doesn't seem to be any automatic backup included (you can buy it for 5 Eur/Month extra).
I used Hetzner once, they didn't like my debit card and I ended up having to send the funds by wire to pay invoice.
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After due consideration, I've decided to stay with Host Europe. The server will be reinstalled once they have Ubuntu 12.04 available, and at that time we'll also switch to another forum software - possibly SMF 2, but I'm not sure yet.
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SMF 2 is a safe bet.
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Things have been a bit wild on the server front: As many of you probably noticed we had four downtimes over the last week. Also, Host Europe decided to push back the availability of Ubuntu 12.04 until at least Q3 2013, so we won't be able to migrate from 8.04 straight to 12.04 because 8.04 won't receive security fixes anymore in a few weeks. The problem is that we already passed the point where I could have cancelled the contract with Host Europe for the next year, so we're probably stuck with giving them our money (150 euros for the year). On the other hand, switching *twice* (8.04 to 10.04, then 10.04 to 12.04) is significant extra work, so I'm still considering to take our ship elsewhere anyway.
I'm ruling out Digital Ocean now because their TOS seem overly restrictive. Hetzner is my current favorite.
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We can haz virtual server at Hetzner nao: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq19 (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_vserver/vq19)
A bit more expensive than our current one (20 Eur / month), but it can be cancelled monthly and there is no setup fee, so I can just try it out for now. Also my brother might pay part of the fee and use it for his own nefarious purposes. If we decide to move over, we might still have the Host Europe server around for another year, but we don't need to let it run empty... might set up some game servers there or something :)
In any case, this would solve the Ubuntu problem, and since the new VS is actually a fully virtualized root server (no paravirtualization as Host Europe use), we can actually update our OS ourselves from now on, without wiping everything. Also we won't be limited in the number of TCP sockets anymore, which will be handy if we're ever stormed by tf2blog again.